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!
A reminder for people in the US who may be concerned, the same time shifting principle from this SCOTUS decision applies to saving streaming content. Simply, if you had legal access to the content at one point in time, you are allowed to time shift by recording and playing back for personal use at another point in time.
!IANAL YMMV!<
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
I use an automated Downloader to download subscribed videos when they are uploaded to watch at my convience ad free.
What software do you use for this purpose?
yes please let us know how to DL
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.
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?
or me casualty saving music I like into a playlist, revisitng it a year later
“57 tracks that are no longer available are hidden”
I’ll just leave this here: https://github.com/jmbannon/ytdl-sub
It’s a tool that watches YouTube channels or playlists, downloads everything, and prepares them so they appear directly in players like Plex, Jellyfin, Kodi etc. Basically the equivalent of the *arr stack for YouTube.
And the grown up version of that is /r/tubearchivist (it also includes a plugin to sync to Jellyfin).
ytdl-sub author here, I kindly disagree calling it a child’s version of TA 🙂 Minus the elastic-search/player, its scraping features I think are a superset of TA while being incredibly lightweight (at the cost of being a CLI tool).
I too am a connoisseur of music vids and concerts, it’s actually one of the main reasons I built ytdl-sub. Feel free to ping me with any questions - happy to help