7 ms·

Nobody needs legal permission to grab all the YouTube content they want to keep. Just dedication, youtube-dlp, and a ginormous RAID array full of empty drives.

Nobody needs legal permission to grab all the YouTube content they want to keep. Just dedication, youtube-dlp, and a ginormous RAID array full of empty drives. This is surprisingly affordable as a hobby.

registeredcorn 4y ago
Note: I would encourage switching over from youtube-dlp to yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) As I understand it, yt-dlp is considerably faster.
- eastof 4y ago
  Just curious, why either of these over vanilla youtube-dl? Wondering if I should update my playlist downloader script
  - sanroot99 4y ago
    YouTube-dl has gone slow af ,yt-dlp is fork that solves that ,my guess is some kind of fingerprinting YouTube is employing to throttle YouTube dl
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    It’s far easier to grab an “archival” grade copy of a YouTube video (includes thumbnail, subtitles, metadata, etc) and ask the program to embed all the data within the video file itself. It can even remux all videos into a selected container format, which is really nice.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  My bad, I meant yt-dlp
autoexec 4y ago
Are you aware of a single person anywhere who has mirrored the entirety of youtube? There is obvious value in having a mirror like that, so why hasn't it been done? Downloading a handful of videos you personally care about is surprisingly affordable as a hobby. Mirroring and archiving the entirety of youtube is not. Personally, although I couldn't say it was a hobby, I don't watch youtube on youtube anymore. Every youtube video I watch is downloaded first and viewed locally. I can't recommend it enough. Zero youtube comments, zero recommendations, VLC is a far better video player, Google has no idea how many times I've watched a video (or parts of it) or how I felt about it, and I never have to worry about videos I find valuable being removed. As long as I keep backing them up, I'll have them for as long as I care to.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  r/datahoarders will kindly and rightly disagree with you on that regard. For an enthusiast, a 720TB array is pretty reachable. A dedicated enthusiast can get a 1PB flash array in 2U.
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    I don't think anybody on /r/datahoarders believes it's possible for a private individual to archive the entirety of Youtube. More than 200,000 hours of video are uploaded every day. Generously assuming something like 1 GB/hour for 1080p, that's 200TB per day that you have to add. No home array can handle that.
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      Don't worry, only a very small subset is worth keeping
      - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
        That’s what you think now.
        autoexec 4y ago
        Even now, the most garbage youtube video out there is still probably useful as training data for some AI (maybe even to generate horrible youtube videos)
        WalterBright 4y ago
        So true. I look at photos I've taken in the past, and discovered that I took pictures of all the wrong things.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      This is a weird hackernews phenomenon where two sides of a discussion present the technical aspect of the thing they want to do, and are correct in their description of the technical aspects, without addressing the fact that they are talking about accomplishing totally unrelated objectives. It is probably possible to horde more Youtube videos than you could ever watch, probably including most of the ones that you might ever be interested in. And it is almost certainly impossible for any individual to capture every video which goes through Youtube. Neither of these seem to address the issue of whether there exist videos which will retrospectively have archival value which are not captured.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
Maybe you can escape the lawsuit if you're downloading 1-2 videos for your own use, but you will be sued once you're large enough to matter. e.g. https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-in/technology/youtube-attempts-to-sue-against-video-downloaders/276692 https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-in/technology/youtube-attemp... https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/is-it-legal-to-download-youtube-videos/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/is-it-legal-to-download-youtub... https://torrentfreak.com/major-record-labels-sue-youtube-dl-hosting-provider-220114/ https://torrentfreak.com/major-record-labels-sue-youtube-dl-...

registeredcorn 4y ago

Note: I would encourage switching over from youtube-dlp to yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) As I understand it, yt-dlp is considerably faster.

eastof 4y ago
Just curious, why either of these over vanilla youtube-dl? Wondering if I should update my playlist downloader script
- sanroot99 4y ago
  YouTube-dl has gone slow af ,yt-dlp is fork that solves that ,my guess is some kind of fingerprinting YouTube is employing to throttle YouTube dl
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  It’s far easier to grab an “archival” grade copy of a YouTube video (includes thumbnail, subtitles, metadata, etc) and ask the program to embed all the data within the video file itself. It can even remux all videos into a selected container format, which is really nice.
selfhoster11 4y ago
My bad, I meant yt-dlp

autoexec 4y ago

Are you aware of a single person anywhere who has mirrored the entirety of youtube? There is obvious value in having a mirror like that, so why hasn't it been done? Downloading a handful of videos you personally care about is surprisingly affordable as a hobby. Mirroring and archiving the entirety of youtube is not. Personally, although I couldn't say it was a hobby, I don't watch youtube on youtube anymore. Every youtube video I watch is downloaded first and viewed locally. I can't recommend it enough. Zero youtube comments, zero recommendations, VLC is a far better video player, Google has no idea how many times I've watched a video (or parts of it) or how I felt about it, and I never have to worry about videos I find valuable being removed. As long as I keep backing them up, I'll have them for as long as I care to.

bayindirh 4y ago
r/datahoarders will kindly and rightly disagree with you on that regard. For an enthusiast, a 720TB array is pretty reachable. A dedicated enthusiast can get a 1PB flash array in 2U.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  I don't think anybody on /r/datahoarders believes it's possible for a private individual to archive the entirety of Youtube. More than 200,000 hours of video are uploaded every day. Generously assuming something like 1 GB/hour for 1080p, that's 200TB per day that you have to add. No home array can handle that.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Don't worry, only a very small subset is worth keeping
    - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
      That’s what you think now.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        Even now, the most garbage youtube video out there is still probably useful as training data for some AI (maybe even to generate horrible youtube videos)
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        So true. I look at photos I've taken in the past, and discovered that I took pictures of all the wrong things.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    This is a weird hackernews phenomenon where two sides of a discussion present the technical aspect of the thing they want to do, and are correct in their description of the technical aspects, without addressing the fact that they are talking about accomplishing totally unrelated objectives. It is probably possible to horde more Youtube videos than you could ever watch, probably including most of the ones that you might ever be interested in. And it is almost certainly impossible for any individual to capture every video which goes through Youtube. Neither of these seem to address the issue of whether there exist videos which will retrospectively have archival value which are not captured.

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

Maybe you can escape the lawsuit if you're downloading 1-2 videos for your own use, but you will be sued once you're large enough to matter. e.g. https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-in/technology/youtube-attempts-to-sue-against-video-downloaders/276692 https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-in/technology/youtube-attemp... https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/is-it-legal-to-download-youtube-videos/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/is-it-legal-to-download-youtub... https://torrentfreak.com/major-record-labels-sue-youtube-dl-hosting-provider-220114/ https://torrentfreak.com/major-record-labels-sue-youtube-dl-...