Example 1:
Right during the pandemic, TFI (French TV) put up all past seasons of its show ‘Star Academy’. It was something I have been trying to get hold of but did not have any luck. As soon as it popped I thought I got it all. (2 years ago). Today I found out I was missing the first season (8 in total) and went to try to grab it. ALL seasons have now been removed. I am quite pissed at it!
Example 2:
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI. The results were mind blowing. I grabbed all the videos I could (official ones are 480p/720 p max limited). Less than 1 week later, the content was gone…forever.
Example 3: (Non YT)
Not YT. Koh Lanta (French equivalent of Survivor) is aired on french TV (TFI again). As soon as the season is over, they take it down. You are unable to rewatch/watch it if you missed the air/stream time. ALL past seasons are also not available and that spans to about 20+ years of contents and 30+seasons. Same applies to US Survivor but to a lesser extent. And you need to keep paying to ‘stream’ it.
Conclusion:
Always archive media you want to rewatch/collect. Streaming is not your friend. It is just another way of controlling content distribution, tying you up to the ‘subscription’ slavery model instead of owning your contents and worse, down the line downright CENSORING or MODIFYING contents to fit whatever garbage narrative is currently en vogue.
Stay focused brothers!
My thing is I just want something to watch my personal playlists/ favorites and save them so I never have that “this video was removed” problem again.
However, I don’t know what can do it. I tried TubeArchivist and another one using their Docker containers in my Unraid server but it doesn’t really do what I’m trying.
i have (checks drive) about 4 TIB of archived youtube content, there is a non zero chance i have something you want if you like the same stuff i do lol.
Somewhere between 7-14 thousand videos. I havent checked the real number.
It’s content i like mostly, with some definite deletions later on. Archived for posterity since if i don’t do it nobody else will, even though unlikely to go bunk. It could happen someday :)
They say there’s a server with everything on it. I don’t know if it’s true but I hear a lot about google just hoarding everything. I assume most of the big companies have offset archives in storage for that later day. They keep them private for reasons. Unlocking them takes skill, guidance, and friendships. You won’t get into any of those rich peoples servers without some clean tea bargaining that’s for sure. S as though some of us are crazy enough to just convince them to open up the whole thing in just a few sweet ledgers of conversation. Call it human instinct. But it’s true. We’re all just people on this world. If the ends meet, well, maybe we’ll just get all that data we’ve been asking for and get to have a drunken party afterwards! Ya know? Anyways…good luck!
I did analysis of my liked videos, based on Google Takeout and 10% of my liked videos are gone.
On the other side I would not watch them again anyways. I just backup important stuff.
Indeed, so many videos I took for granted disappeared later. Max the storage, max the network speed… hoard everything!
This is something I have been able to work much better on thanks to TheFrenchGhosty’s Ultimate YouTube-DL Scripts Collection. It’s easy to download, but hard to curate and sort as I would like playlists to be in numerical order, but it doesn’t scale well if a new video is added or an order is swapped. Best stick to iso date format as that is some form of an order. I may make some tweaks to them such as better sponsorblock support and just for archival use only.
it’s just such a shame that yt liked playlist got completely privated some years ago so you can’t automatically download everything
I’ve set up “Tube Archivist” and don’t regret it whatsoever. Automatically scans my playlists or channels I add at the times I set the cron to. It’s still somewhat in early development and the cookie-parsing doesn’t work half the time for me sadly, tho I seem to be one of just a few cases who have this issue.
It’s a game-changer when it comes to archiving :) It even saves subtitles, comments and SponsorBlock timestamps.
I did as well last week. And I am in love. I’m still conservative on what I download and specifically what I subcribe to. But the process is now sooooo much easier compared to the manual labour I did before (and have for five years). Maybe my top docker app install this year!
Does anyone know if there is a similar tool for tiktok?
Yet another vote for https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist I’ve been using it for several months and it’s fantastic.
Sigh, I used to. But have run out of storage space. I’m feeling very anxious.
I (finally!) installed Tube Archivist last week and went through my library of already archived YT videos and saved them manually in TA (it’s the easiest way if you haven’t saved the metadata to go with the video, which I hadn’t for the oldest videos). Out of almost 1000 videos over five years or so, maybe 5% have gone private or is gone from YT. And it was mostly videos I really wanted to keep. Now comes the dirty work of trying to find the metadata for those missing videos since I do have them locally. I have done some research around how to do it, but if anyone has actually figured it out it would be nice to know!
Way too much stuff is disappearing these days, my archive has over 200k videos that have been removed from YouTube
What prompts you to archive this stuff? I’m a YouTuber and while I do have my own archives, I don’t want to archive it for me, I want that data to be available for years, decades, perhaps centuries to come.
Like what if YT goes for some reason. What’s essentially my current, most important job is all there. If it goes, the last 5 years of my life are effectively deleted.
Mostly just the fact that there’s so much culture and history out there and it’s all disappearing (or worse, being modified and replaced) in front of our eyes. If I don’t save it, nobody else will.
That’s bad ass man, respect
So it’s kinda like you feel like data preservation is your calling, so to speak. That’s quite admirable.
I can think of several instances where archivists saved the day. Most notably when the BBC lost loads of episodes of Doctor Who, and thankfully, some fans had them recorded on VHS and were able to send them in.
It’s similar to the story about a lady that spent 24 hours a day recording live stuff to VHS from tv channels in the 80’s onwards. Turns out a lot of it was never saved by the broadcasters. She had some of it on literally thousands of tapes. Apparently she had like 6 recordings going on in parallell, all the time. Spending a lot of her time switching out tapes…
I guess you could call her an analogue horder? :)
She’s my hero.
That’s impressive. Only ones that has been removed, or in total?
Just the removed ones, the total’s over a million
How do you find out a video is gone from YT at that scale?
Impressive. Can we access it, or is it a personal archive?
It’s infeasible to host the entire archive publicly the way it’s setup, but I put removed stuff people request on hobune.stream
I basically throw every YT video I watch into TubeArchivist. The browser extension makes this a single click. Currently have over 5TB of YT videos saved, including whole channels.
I learned this one the hard way. I am an NBA fan and YouTube used to be a bastion of full games from 80 - early 2000s.
I started archiving, but then the Last Dance happened and the NBA scrubbed the Internet of all old full games.
I got half way through backing up all the 90s bulls championships before the purge and it still bugs me.
It’s annoying when you know they where there at some point and you just never got to them. At least they actually published som classic games on YT during the pandemic and most (all?) of them are still there. I have archived them of course :)
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI.
Care to share ? :D
Sooner or later all these streaming first movies and shows that had zero physical release will start to go missing or in limbo when these companies go under and people will wonder where they can find them.
I know a lot of the shows I enjoy watching on netflix will be gone someday unless I start backing them up now.
They already do. https://movieweb.com/bryan-cranston-on-the-one-and-only-ivan/
That’s why I pay for some streaming services but never actually use them to watch shows. If you know what I mean? ;)
If a show you like is still running, might not hurt to “watch” the show in the background to ensure additional seasons get made.