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!

  • LynchMob_Lerry@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    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.

  • LaGrande-Gwaz@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    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

  • HubiRo@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    you can setup a cron job to run yt-dlp with a link to your “liked videos” playlist periodically

  • Motorsheep@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I actually purchased a copy of ‘4K Video Downloader’ for this very purpose, and previously used Internet Download Manager for many years (I still use IDM as a backup as 4k sometimes can’t download videos with particular settings). I was able to save a few pulled videos this way, and have an extensive collection I can look back on. It is a kick to see postage-stamp sized videos of memes I was watching in the mid 2000’s. I don’t keep everything I download, but I download everything I watch.

  • serendipitybot@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    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/

  • ziggo0@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    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.

  • bluedays@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I’ve been having a helluva time finding Sesame Street episodes from the 70s.

  • grandinosour@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I use an automated Downloader to download subscribed videos when they are uploaded to watch at my convience ad free.

  • FinanceFit6474@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    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!

  • Goldmaster@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    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.

  • ASatyros@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    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.

  • NyaaTell@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Indeed, so many videos I took for granted disappeared later. Max the storage, max the network speed… hoard everything!

  • bregottextrasaltat@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    it’s just such a shame that yt liked playlist got completely privated some years ago so you can’t automatically download everything