I’ve been at it for months
Nothing is permanent
My dad sometimes asks me to help him find some movie from the 70s or 80s and it simply doesn’t exist anymore. The internet promised me I’d never be in that situation myself. The internet lied.
There’s only one video I need to download.
Everyone told me, why are you keeping all those harddrives with old movies and media and porn and comic books and books and audio lectures and all that shit. Why you hoarding it?
And after thirty years I was like, you know what, maybe they’re right. I’m just hoarding at this point.
But then I check online and shit is disappearing forever. I knew it would happen 30 years ago, and took precautions. It may not be much but I did my part.
All of us already pay for it. It’s time to stop sucking corpo dick. Building a company out of garage, to exploit every angle isn’t something to celebrate. That data center and that power line and power plants everyone pays for isn’t a bastion to stand on. Everyone is paying for it. It’s not magic, the content creators are being grifted as well.
There are yt-dlp GUIs with SponsorBlock built-in.
Warning: after using SponsorBlock and uBlock Origin for a while, using YouTube or Invidious without them is horrific.
Been doing it for more than a decade… and never stop
It only takes a couple of times to realize how quickly something you care about can be taken away and you’ll never see/hear it again. Netflix brought on such convenience. I remember I watched Scrubs front to back multiple times, until one day I was told that it was leaving and suddenly I couldn’t watch it anymore.
Youtubers and creators come and go, if there is something you care about it’s on you to preserve it. No one else will.
I wish there was a legal way for me to create a “backup” version for others to watch like a PeerTube instance, but to creators they would see it as not fair to them, so unfortunately my collection remains private.
Since you brought up Scrubs, there’s another funny thing about syndication. Oftentimes the music is not paid for in perpetuity, meaning only a couple seasons can contain the original music. Scrubs is one of these, if you watch streaming now it will not have the music it had then. Another example is The Wonder years intro song.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/225-television-broadcast-tv/60153113
Sometimes they can‘t even get the rights to some localized anime so they either re-dub the entire thing or just upload it without a dub. The whole IP mess that has been created decades ago really comes back to bite them in the ass big time with shows like One Piece. The only way to watch it properly in some countries are unofficial ways.
Piracy is preservation.
For profit corporations are not to be trusted with cultural preservation.
Remember the community D&D episode, then they pulled it forever because of the blackface joke with the dark elf face paint?
Is not even licensing, it’s just some exec had an opinion that maybe this is the least bit controversial or not in the current political zeitgeist.
Same with the Simpsons Michael Jackson episode, 30 Rock and It’s Always Sunny also had black face jokes that ironically were meant to make the viewer feel extremely uncomfortable and realize how racist the character was being that are now gone.
Whether you agree with the jokes/premise or not, I believe we shouldn’t pretend like none of that happened. To me that makes it worse. The fact that we feel so uncomfortable with it now proves that we are marching forward, and that doesn’t mean we blindly hide from our mistakes. I like what WB did with Looney Tunes, they put a disclaimer warning that it was there, and that it was from it’s time, and that to remove it would mean removing the evidence of how far we’ve come.
were meant to make the viewer feel extremely uncomfortable and realize how racist the character was being
The Diversity Day episode of the office comes to mind as something matching this exact description that has been excluded on streaming platforms.
Is diversity freaking gone?? That was the entire point!
It was only a few years ago that Disneyland overhauled Splash Mountain to be themed around The Princess and The Frog instead of Song of the South, even though they did their damndest for decades to make it difficult to obtain the movie.
The original season of Stranger Things also had an episode that got retconned in part because of MeToo.
What was it?
I haven’t seen it since season one.
They tinkered with the pool scene where Charlie is photographing the party from the bushes, to my understanding.
I wish there was a legal way for me to create a “backup” version for others to watch like a PeerTube instance, but to creators they would see it as not fair to them, so unfortunately my collection remains private.
I just give credit to the original channel name and provide the link to the original video. Now I know this is still illegal, but… I can’t be bothered to care. Being able to just randomly open videos from my library on any device with internet connection is a bliss. Also sharing stuff from my collection is so easy. I don’t earn any money from hosting those videos, so I think it’s not that bad.
Just upload it to the IA it’s unlikely to be DMCAd
You can buy Scrubs on DVD and Blu-Ray. It‘s not a Netflix exclusive thing. I don‘t even know if it ever was on Netflix in my region to be honest. Just saying, because I think your example is off.
Fewer and fewer people even have physical media players these days.
The only reason I have a modest collection of Blu-Rays (mostly Criterion Collection) is because I have a PS5 with the disc drive. Otherwise, I’d have no means of playing them.
It only takes a couple of times to realize how quickly something you care about can be taken away and you’ll never see/hear it again.It still bothers me that I didn’t download my favourite videos before they got lost forever when they burned the library of Pornhub.
I understand your pain, all too well
Imagine
yt-dlp --output-device=vhsand then you have a little free library in your neighborhood.I am still exploring PeerTube, as a user, but I am not sure, the UI of certain websites does not give me the confidence, maybe because I am developer and I am really picky with every detail but I am not sure. Maybe I am wrong.
Ao3 is still down :(
STACHER7 FOR YT-DLP
yt-dlp is the gold standard for ripping YouTube vids (as well as vids/music from damn near anywhere else). However, yt-dlp is not particularly user friendly, like, at all. There is a GUI wrapper called Stacher7 that makes it a whole lot easier to use. It’s one of the better things I’ve installed on my computer.
There’s also Parabolic which is nice.
whot? there’s a website for it https://www.ezmdl.com/ it doesn’t allow you to query massive downloads, (you can do playlists, but to do multiple playlists at the same time you gotta duplicate the window and put each playlist in a new tab) but it has no ads and is super simple, a kid could use this one (limited to mp4 and mp3 with no quality options, but still)
yt-dlp is such a great little app
I’m running MeTube as docker container on my home server and it’s wonderful!
puts on pirate hat would this work for uploaded memes by chance? I make Minecraft content and having to separately download .gif’s and .mp3’s is getting a bit tiresome when I’d like to drop in some cheeky brain rot in for the top kek lulz while I edit the footage in Resolve.
The yt-dlp tool is plenty user friendly. It’s some of the best/most consistent semantics I’ve seen. The command on the other hand…
whot? there’s a website for it https://www.ezmdl.com/ it doesn’t allow you to query massive downloads, (you can do playlists, but to do multiple playlists at the same time you gotta duplicate the window and put each playlist in a new tab) but it has no ads and is super simple, a kid could use this one (limited to mp4 and mp3 with no quality options, but still)
Not just YouTube. Download everything. No exceptions.
Will do.
clicks “Accept all cookies”
Where do I send my dick pics?
Put them on a floppy disk
My DMs have always been here… smh
Inb4 Sam Altman says all hard drives belong in data centers.
All your hard drive are belong to shareholder
It’s silly how “the internet remembers” saying gets repeated. That was true pre-2010 roughly. These days it’s evidently not that difficult for someone to be disappeared or disappear themselves from the internet.
Unless you’re high profile enough or you’ve really angered a crowd. Nobody is going to be archiving you. Certainly nobody is dedicated enough to ensure that your content is perpetually hosted somewhere.
There are some Youtubers from the 2010 era who I used to watch. It’s as if they never existed. They made their ad money and vanished.
It’s silly how “the internet remembers” saying gets repeated. That was true pre-2010 roughly. These days it’s evidently not that difficult for someone to be disappeared or disappear themselves from the internet.
Sayings like this are about threat modelling (worst-case scenarios). If you post something to the internet you need to assume that it will be preserved for eternity. If you want to preserve something on the internet, you need to assume that it will disappear.
The internet remembered back in those days ironically because stuff was harder to get and less accessible. People downloaded stuff because they weren’t sure when they might be on a slow connection or not have a connection at all, and once it was downloaded, it would sit there collecting dust until someone realized that it had vanished from its original source and like a hydra, two people who downloaded it would later upload it again. Always-online broadband and streaming basically killed that whole mentality. People just assume it will always be available from the original source… until it isn’t, and then it’s too late.
I do this again now. I use YouTube as just a frontend and copy links into yt-dlp to watch without ads at my leisure. If I like it and think I’ll watch it again I simply don’t delete it after I’ve watched it. They’re like 80mb videos each.
In days of yore, I did this because I wanted to rewatch the same videos over and over. It was hugely wasteful and also frustrating to do this on a dial up connection.
My favourite part is I get “real” 1080p, rather than whatever Google thinks I’ll believe is 1080p.
my now deleted reddit account is archived on pullpush, just cause they scrape everything. I don’t have stalkers, but i might in the future. They’ve just totally ignored my GDPR request and blocked me from communication lol. i’ve complained to my DPA but i think i either got ignored or i’m expected to wait over a year.
I wonder, could you file a DMCA takedown request since it’s your own posts and comments?
Unfortunately, probably not. As far back when I first signed up – 2010? 2012? I don’t remember now – there was language in the account creation page that asserted you were giving Reddit, Inc. full and perpetual ownership, copyright, license to anything and everything you contributed, and more besides. I only remember because the insane breadth of it was ridiculous, even at the time. DMCA is copyright-based relief, and Reddit users including myself signed all that away.
But either way, US-based corporations are largely sliding me into the “make me” legal model with customers regardless of the actual legality of their actions, from big tech on down, so anyone in the US who is serious about getting their stuff taken down should get a legal opinion before giving up because it’s just too complex to navigate anymore, IMO. (Many attorneys offer free one-time consults).
Still trying to get all my favorite flash videos…
Harry Potter vs DBZ on Newgrounds two decades later is still funnier than everything YouTube pushes out.
Was it archived by flashpoint? I know their focus was games, but they did have some videos too.
I agree on principle, but on what storage? Who’s with me in planning a data center heist?
Get a low-power GPU for 50 $ on ebay. Still faster than your poor iGPU at converting your videos to a more recent format with 1/3 the space requirements.
Also, does the cat-funny video need to be in 4k? yt-dlp
-Fto list and-fto choose (accepts ‘+’ combinations).It’s not as bad as people are saying. Storage has gotten more expensive, but: 1h of YouTube at 1080p is around 3GB. Storage is currently sitting at 25-30€/TB. That allows you to save 330h of YouTube content, which is a lot.
Im down
You son of a bitch, I’m in
I recently bought a used 10tb hard drive for $190.
It’s decently affordable, look it up.
and you won’t have a backup when it suddenly fails. if it starts reporting bad blocks, you may not even have enough time to copy everything off of it before it fails. you should at least run something that notifies you if it starts to fail, if you don’t yet have it.
at 10 TB read speeds are still roughly at most 120 MB/s, which means roughly a full day of continuous copying. sometimes drives fail faster under that stress.
all I want to say, is be careful.
Having a backup is always essential, especially for things that cannot simply be redownloaded.
Currently, I have irrecoverable info stored elsewhere (outside my home), and I plan on getting a second 10tb drive just to have a full copy.
In the past years I have downloaded and archived about 200 GB of my favorite YouTube videos using yt-dlp. Most of them are short or low resolution for storage reasons, so it’s a lot more videos than you’d think. Now they can’t be taken away from me and I can watch them whenever I want.
So yt-dlp can be a bit rough for non-power users. There is a fantastic GUI wrapper for it called Stacher7. I use it daily.
I dunno if I would call it rough; it’s just a CLI tool. You write
yt-dlpand then paste in the URL.Maybe I’m doing that xkcd comic where I overestimate average people’s familiarity with CLI though. It only gets complicated if you want to customise it beyond the basic flags in your global config file. I set it to include chapters and download subtitles for example. Once I get home I’ll try and remember to paste my config file here.
Edit:
~/yt-dlp.conf# Save the files to this directory with this format --paths /mnt/Vidoes/inprogress/youtube --output "%(uploader)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" # Include subtitles and chapter metadata --write-subs --embed-chapters # Resume incomplete downloads --continue # I use Vivaldi exclusively with a burner account to find videos to download so that Google thinks my activity is more organic --cookies-from-browser vivaldi # Optional - Only needed if you have issues downloading subtitles. I had to git clone and build "bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider" to generate tokens to download files properly. This part was just copy pasted from their instructions --extractor-args "youtubepot-bgutilscript:server_home=/home/[username]/git/bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider/server" # Optional quality filter - Possibly the only complicated part. This tells YT-DLP to prefer downloading H264 MP4 files, because my old as fuck android tablet doesn't support any other format. It also forces 1080p video, because I found after downloading too many videos YouTube will downgrade you to 360p and I'd rather get an error message than watch a 360p video. Some 720p only videos I edit this temporarily --format "bv[height=1080][vcodec^=avc1][ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[height=1080][vcodec^=avc1][ext=mp4]/bv*[height=1080]+ba/b[height=1080]"You will need to delete any # comments in your own config - I don’t think they’re supported. I included them for explanation.
You think typing yt-dlp URL is rough for users? I cannot think of a simpler command line command other than maybe ls.
command line command
There you go. That alone makes it more complicated than Stacher7. All I know is I went to the yt-dlp homepage, started reading how to use it, then realized someone probably made it easier, did a quick Google search, and found Stacher7 which required no learning at all.
not really though. it is more like this, simplified:
yt-dlp URL --output /path/with/all/the/funky/patameters.%(ext) --all-the-worlds-parameters-for-good-format-quality-subs-whateverelseyes if you want to download a single video or two, the basic command works somewhat, but not usable if you want to download lots of videos from multiple channels
You’re making up cases that don’t need to exist. The basic command and its defaults works fine. It can download every video from every channel. Don’t need anything else.
when downloading lots of videos, you will have to take some compromises for it to be economical. like you probably dont need full quality, especially when its 4k or something insane like that. so you will want to use a very simple parameter like this:
-f "bestvideo[height<=?720]+bestaudio/best"already memorized it, right?
or, what if you would accidentally redownload a video? you forgot you already downloaded a specific video, so you rerun it. maybe even its content has changed since then. or you are downloading a playlist or a whole channel, and you dont want to redownload existing ones all the time. what you do?
--no-overwrites --archive-file filename --force-write-archiveor if you dont want to download formats that might be a pain in the ass to play later:
--prefer-free-formatsbut yeah, you can ignore all of this and be surprised later when you can’t sustain your archive anymore. or use a gui tool that shows these settings in a prominent place so you can decide in time.
oh and don’t forget links that your terminal could misinterpret as a standalone command to run, because it has an ampersand or something like in it. the average user is not experienced with the terminal to quote every URL
It was a bummer for me when Trash Discourse nuked their own channel without warning. I disagreed with them on many topics, but their essays on sex work, sex history, and queer history were great. I wish I had downloaded them.
