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!
Wow, a Koh-Lanta reference outside of r/survivor. Not something I expected.
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.
I have 10-12 channels I back up. I have a windows task schedule to run YT-DLP every 12 hours on each channel and they are spaced out as much as I can so there is as little overlap as possible and the ones that do are the ones that done update regularly.
I’ve done similarly, RedLetterMedia, some of my fav streamers and long plays, Gaki no Tsukai - and recently DnD streams. If I’m on my PC at least, I play the videos straight from youtube as a means of support to the channels, but any other time? I’ve got my copies on a loop.
Had been using Tartube and I never delved deep into youtube-dl cmd prompts. Recently it seems to have issue downloading the highest available quality, but I’m beginning to not care as much most of the time, I just rip it to a lo bit rate mp3 to listen to when I’m driving, cooking, w/e. Most of the time, the content I have is very conducive to just audio only.
Greetings ye, I still am lamenting the long-ago deletion of that “Ed, Edd, n’ Eddy” video, in which “Nigh of Fire” is synchronized onto the film’s opening vehicle-chase; such was the means that I was formally introduced into Euro’beat. -__-
~Waz
you can setup a cron job to run yt-dlp with a link to your “liked videos” playlist periodically
This is why I save all music/audiobooks/etc. In flac from deezer. Its so fucked up if theres something coming to mind which you want so Bad after remembering it just to Disco ver its gone.
It’s TF1 (one), not TFI :crying:
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.
This submission has been randomly featured in /r/serendipity, a bot-driven subreddit discovery engine. More here: /r/Serendipity/comments/186bl9k/always_always_archive_youtube_videos_you_want_to/
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.
On my rack I have a little emblem that says ‘Archive Everything’ - it’s a cute animal looking over a set of folders. I archive what I can.
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!
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.