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Every so often, I come across an old blog post or other content with a YouTube video embedded in it. About half the time, it'll have been taken down by a false-

Every so often, I come across an old blog post or other content with a YouTube video embedded in it. About half the time, it'll have been taken down by a false-positive copyright claim. It seems that YouTube videos can't be permanent, only ephemeral; as a long-term hosting service it simply doesn't function.

Digital-Citizen 9y ago
Yet another reason not to host on YouTube. Here are some more reasons not to host with YouTube: - some YouTube videos use nonfree Javascript to implement DRM. https://notabug.org/GPast/avideo/ https://notabug.org/GPast/avideo/ is a youtube-dl variant that avoids running that JS code. notabug.org seems to be down as I type this, perhaps it will return later. - should you wish to allow your video to be downloaded, YouTube sets up needless barriers to allow downloads. - hosting with YouTube means you and your users are being tracked by Google (which owns YouTube). - YouTube doesn't make it clear how to download the precise video file the submitter uploaded; users get rewritten videos instead. - YouTube only hosts videos, not arbitrary kinds of other media. All of these problems are easily solved: use the Internet Archive (at https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/) and your own hosting instead of YouTube. IA offers a download URL which is static and will redirect to your uploaded data. You can use this URL in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage (again, no JS needed). IA will (by default) rewrite certain kinds of files, but your original uploaded file is also available and machine-determinable (via an XML file that clearly indicates which is the source file and which are derivative files). IA can be used fully without JS turned on (no need to worry about executing code to get files). IA hosting is gratis (zero cost), as is YouTube. I have no evidence which indicates IA tracks users akin to how Google does. I encourage you to consider hosting your media with the Internet Archive and your own website instead of YouTube.
- nasredin 9y ago
  Mr. Stallman, is that you? --- One more reason Google sucks: Google recently deleted hundreds of videos of the war in Syria. Potential evidence of war crimes erased. Original uploaders may be dead. I don't think some tech people realize the consequences of their decisions.
  - tgarma1234 9y ago
    For those that don't get the joke: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/106-is-that-you-kd/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/106-is-that-you-kd/
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      I can't imagine listening to the audio, but reading the transcript is nauseating due to the frequent occurrence of the work like.
      - welly 9y ago
        197 occurrences of the word like. This particular section of the transcript annoyed me the most. --- He’s fired. And becomes like basically a celebrity for certain parts of like the right. And they were kind of like… Like this is not what he was necessarily saying about himself, but for them, it’s like… He’s like this perfect symbol of like the qualified, brilliant, genius coder who’s the best person for the job, whatever his race or gender happen to be, who said one reasonable thing and like got fired because of political correctness.
        TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        That's the paragraph that led me to hitting the back button.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      That couldn't possibly be the source of this joke, so why this particular link? (Also, frankly, this interview doesn't exactly present its participants as the sharpest tools in the shed.)
      - tgarma1234 9y ago
        The comments that followed my comment are the reason I wish it was possible to simply delete a ycombinator/hacker news profile. It's an entertaining episode from a show I enjoy. Apparently, there are no other fans of the show here. Very sorry.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  Do you contribute to the Internet Archive? Video service is ridiculously expensive, and using them to hotlink HTML5 video onto your Web site seems...kinda antithetical to the spirit of what you're saying.
  - weinzierl 9y ago
    This is true but I think OP meant Internet Archive in addition to self hosting. > use the Internet Archive (at https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/) and your own hosting instead of YouTube
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      Use IA to set up a canonical, permanent URL for the media, which resolves to a host under your control as long as it's available, then resolves to the IA-hosted archived copy if your site ever disappears? As long as the URL doesn't change, a CDN could do most of the heavy lifting anyway, right?
    - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
      No, OP meant embedding Archive hosted assets onto your site, or any site. > You can use [the Internet Archive URL] in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage
  - Digital-Citizen 9y ago
    There's nothing special about "video service" nor is that even a relevant concept to discuss and in no way contradicts anything I said. If you're going to claim otherwise, please be specific about this alleged contradiction so we can have a meaningful conversation. Serving data is serving data. Hosters have to put effort into disguising/obfuscating a URL to make it not be a static link (and thus completely useful for HTML5 video/audio use, or pointing others to download and keep, or something else). If a hoster doesn't want one to distribute the files, that is the issue. Not whether one distributes them for use in an HTML5 video/audio element, or downloading for local storage, or use in some other way. https://blog.archive.org/2009/07/01/archive-org-supports-the-new-video-html-tag/ https://blog.archive.org/2009/07/01/archive-org-supports-the... would seem to address your claim.
- krackers 9y ago
  >IA hosting is gratis Not a scaleable solution though. If everyone were to do the same they'd quickly be consumed by bandwidth costs.
  - harlanji 9y ago
    RasPi + Cloudflare should be a good solution. Even live streaming is possible with CDN as live streams are just conventions with playlists and metadata. I can't comment on costs at scale, but Twitter claims equal ingress and egress bandwidth for Persicope (ie. first egress hit caches), standard HLS will just have more latency and not more cache misses if I understand correctly. My stream is 1500-2500kbps 720p.
  - Digital-Citizen 9y ago
    That's quite a claim made without any pointer to evidence. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? IA has been around for many years and not bumped into this problem. Nor are they making choices that even hint at this problem. In fact, they have long made choices (such as default derivatives generation) which suggest they have plenty of storage space and bandwidth. Also, this isn't an evidenceless complaint specific to IA.
- thecatspaw 9y ago
  > I encourage you to consider hosting your media with the Internet Archive and your own website instead of YouTube. unfortunately this makes your content pretty hidden. You are not within youtube's search anymore, you're not in any sidebar as related video either
  - arca_vorago 9y ago
    This is why I am increasingly of the hub and spoke method. You create content and host it on your own, but then reupload it to various sites that fill a need (youtube/vimeo/dailymotion for video, etc). Then not only is the content when removed from one (say youtube) still there in another place/form, but it can just be reuploaded. Own your own content, but if you seek to spread a message you might want to use closed proprietary ecosystems as long as you aren't dependent on them. For example, I was recently updating linkedin, and went to add Bruce Schneier, but he had a post that said he never checks or uses it and only links to his website from there. He still has a presence there though, and that really hit me how much these little walled gardens we let take over so much of our compute ecosystem are starting to look like prison, even for your standard copyleft hating SV hipster. Of course Stallman would say don't even use them, and he makes some good points, but the problem we have now is even if you have a good message you can't reach the masses without going through some priestly gatekeeper of the government-corporate media power. So you have to use the system to beat the system.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      Well yeah, think of it like backups. You wouldn't keep just a single copy of an important document, would you? And certainly not on a cloud service with randomly-enforced ToS, right? Upload to as many sites as possible, link between them. Keep offline copies if you can.
    - loup-vaillant 9y ago
      > So you have to use the system to beat the system. Which by the way is what RMS did back when the GNU system didn't exist: use proprietary UNIX to develop GNU, replace the system piecemeal.
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  How about distributing one's videos through BitTorrent instead? Should scale pretty well. Granted, viewing the video becomes a hassle. But it works.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    IPFS is better for that. Example: https://eternum.io/ipfs/QmSV87hzPYKxo8Go7A2JCsfCVXPqV8poovGk9tFrVJmdNr https://eternum.io/ipfs/QmSV87hzPYKxo8Go7A2JCsfCVXPqV8poovGk...
  - progval 9y ago
    Or with PeerTube, which makes videos available in the browser AND uses a bittorrent-like protocol: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
  - Digital-Citizen 9y ago
    IA (https://archive.org https://archive.org) offers a BitTorrent feed for each of its uploads. You should check out what IA offers.
- seanwasere 9y ago
  internets archives version of the file is copyright internet archive. it is one great big copyright scam
y04nn 9y ago
Exactly, when I want to look my watch history to see what I was watching 5 years ago, most videos have been taken down or removed by the author. And Youtube does not even display the title of the video or its description, so I have no idea what it was.
Feniks 9y ago
No its human greed.Don't monetize your video and it will be fine for years. YT never deletes anything, which is why they're losing money. Any archive ALWAYS loses money. Hosting cat videos for 10 years isn't a good business case.

Digital-Citizen 9y ago

Yet another reason not to host on YouTube. Here are some more reasons not to host with YouTube: - some YouTube videos use nonfree Javascript to implement DRM. https://notabug.org/GPast/avideo/ https://notabug.org/GPast/avideo/ is a youtube-dl variant that avoids running that JS code. notabug.org seems to be down as I type this, perhaps it will return later. - should you wish to allow your video to be downloaded, YouTube sets up needless barriers to allow downloads. - hosting with YouTube means you and your users are being tracked by Google (which owns YouTube). - YouTube doesn't make it clear how to download the precise video file the submitter uploaded; users get rewritten videos instead. - YouTube only hosts videos, not arbitrary kinds of other media. All of these problems are easily solved: use the Internet Archive (at https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/) and your own hosting instead of YouTube. IA offers a download URL which is static and will redirect to your uploaded data. You can use this URL in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage (again, no JS needed). IA will (by default) rewrite certain kinds of files, but your original uploaded file is also available and machine-determinable (via an XML file that clearly indicates which is the source file and which are derivative files). IA can be used fully without JS turned on (no need to worry about executing code to get files). IA hosting is gratis (zero cost), as is YouTube. I have no evidence which indicates IA tracks users akin to how Google does. I encourage you to consider hosting your media with the Internet Archive and your own website instead of YouTube.

nasredin 9y ago
Mr. Stallman, is that you? --- One more reason Google sucks: Google recently deleted hundreds of videos of the war in Syria. Potential evidence of war crimes erased. Original uploaders may be dead. I don't think some tech people realize the consequences of their decisions.
- tgarma1234 9y ago
  For those that don't get the joke: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/106-is-that-you-kd/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/106-is-that-you-kd/
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    I can't imagine listening to the audio, but reading the transcript is nauseating due to the frequent occurrence of the work like.
    - welly 9y ago
      197 occurrences of the word like. This particular section of the transcript annoyed me the most. --- He’s fired. And becomes like basically a celebrity for certain parts of like the right. And they were kind of like… Like this is not what he was necessarily saying about himself, but for them, it’s like… He’s like this perfect symbol of like the qualified, brilliant, genius coder who’s the best person for the job, whatever his race or gender happen to be, who said one reasonable thing and like got fired because of political correctness.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        That's the paragraph that led me to hitting the back button.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    That couldn't possibly be the source of this joke, so why this particular link? (Also, frankly, this interview doesn't exactly present its participants as the sharpest tools in the shed.)
    - tgarma1234 9y ago
      The comments that followed my comment are the reason I wish it was possible to simply delete a ycombinator/hacker news profile. It's an entertaining episode from a show I enjoy. Apparently, there are no other fans of the show here. Very sorry.
jsmthrowaway 9y ago
Do you contribute to the Internet Archive? Video service is ridiculously expensive, and using them to hotlink HTML5 video onto your Web site seems...kinda antithetical to the spirit of what you're saying.
- weinzierl 9y ago
  This is true but I think OP meant Internet Archive in addition to self hosting. > use the Internet Archive (at https://archive.org/ https://archive.org/) and your own hosting instead of YouTube
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Use IA to set up a canonical, permanent URL for the media, which resolves to a host under your control as long as it's available, then resolves to the IA-hosted archived copy if your site ever disappears? As long as the URL doesn't change, a CDN could do most of the heavy lifting anyway, right?
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    No, OP meant embedding Archive hosted assets onto your site, or any site. > You can use [the Internet Archive URL] in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage
- Digital-Citizen 9y ago
  There's nothing special about "video service" nor is that even a relevant concept to discuss and in no way contradicts anything I said. If you're going to claim otherwise, please be specific about this alleged contradiction so we can have a meaningful conversation. Serving data is serving data. Hosters have to put effort into disguising/obfuscating a URL to make it not be a static link (and thus completely useful for HTML5 video/audio use, or pointing others to download and keep, or something else). If a hoster doesn't want one to distribute the files, that is the issue. Not whether one distributes them for use in an HTML5 video/audio element, or downloading for local storage, or use in some other way. https://blog.archive.org/2009/07/01/archive-org-supports-the-new-video-html-tag/ https://blog.archive.org/2009/07/01/archive-org-supports-the... would seem to address your claim.
krackers 9y ago
>IA hosting is gratis Not a scaleable solution though. If everyone were to do the same they'd quickly be consumed by bandwidth costs.
- harlanji 9y ago
  RasPi + Cloudflare should be a good solution. Even live streaming is possible with CDN as live streams are just conventions with playlists and metadata. I can't comment on costs at scale, but Twitter claims equal ingress and egress bandwidth for Persicope (ie. first egress hit caches), standard HLS will just have more latency and not more cache misses if I understand correctly. My stream is 1500-2500kbps 720p.
- Digital-Citizen 9y ago
  That's quite a claim made without any pointer to evidence. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? IA has been around for many years and not bumped into this problem. Nor are they making choices that even hint at this problem. In fact, they have long made choices (such as default derivatives generation) which suggest they have plenty of storage space and bandwidth. Also, this isn't an evidenceless complaint specific to IA.
thecatspaw 9y ago
> I encourage you to consider hosting your media with the Internet Archive and your own website instead of YouTube. unfortunately this makes your content pretty hidden. You are not within youtube's search anymore, you're not in any sidebar as related video either
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  This is why I am increasingly of the hub and spoke method. You create content and host it on your own, but then reupload it to various sites that fill a need (youtube/vimeo/dailymotion for video, etc). Then not only is the content when removed from one (say youtube) still there in another place/form, but it can just be reuploaded. Own your own content, but if you seek to spread a message you might want to use closed proprietary ecosystems as long as you aren't dependent on them. For example, I was recently updating linkedin, and went to add Bruce Schneier, but he had a post that said he never checks or uses it and only links to his website from there. He still has a presence there though, and that really hit me how much these little walled gardens we let take over so much of our compute ecosystem are starting to look like prison, even for your standard copyleft hating SV hipster. Of course Stallman would say don't even use them, and he makes some good points, but the problem we have now is even if you have a good message you can't reach the masses without going through some priestly gatekeeper of the government-corporate media power. So you have to use the system to beat the system.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    Well yeah, think of it like backups. You wouldn't keep just a single copy of an important document, would you? And certainly not on a cloud service with randomly-enforced ToS, right? Upload to as many sites as possible, link between them. Keep offline copies if you can.
  - loup-vaillant 9y ago
    > So you have to use the system to beat the system. Which by the way is what RMS did back when the GNU system didn't exist: use proprietary UNIX to develop GNU, replace the system piecemeal.
loup-vaillant 9y ago
How about distributing one's videos through BitTorrent instead? Should scale pretty well. Granted, viewing the video becomes a hassle. But it works.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  IPFS is better for that. Example: https://eternum.io/ipfs/QmSV87hzPYKxo8Go7A2JCsfCVXPqV8poovGk9tFrVJmdNr https://eternum.io/ipfs/QmSV87hzPYKxo8Go7A2JCsfCVXPqV8poovGk...
- progval 9y ago
  Or with PeerTube, which makes videos available in the browser AND uses a bittorrent-like protocol: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
- Digital-Citizen 9y ago
  IA (https://archive.org https://archive.org) offers a BitTorrent feed for each of its uploads. You should check out what IA offers.
seanwasere 9y ago
internets archives version of the file is copyright internet archive. it is one great big copyright scam

y04nn 9y ago

Exactly, when I want to look my watch history to see what I was watching 5 years ago, most videos have been taken down or removed by the author. And Youtube does not even display the title of the video or its description, so I have no idea what it was.

Feniks 9y ago

No its human greed.Don't monetize your video and it will be fine for years. YT never deletes anything, which is why they're losing money. Any archive ALWAYS loses money. Hosting cat videos for 10 years isn't a good business case.