Download your favourite YouTube videos

Most of my YouTube playlists say something like "15 unavailable videos are hidden", or about ~10% for a 5 years old playlist. The same ratio holds true for most bookmarks of YouTube videos I have.

There's videos from ~15 years ago that I consider gone for good - lost to the great copyright apocalypse - having been unable to find them anywhere on the today's internet.

I have a nightly job that looks at all my youtube playlists, and downloads them to disk. It also sends me an email whenever a video that I haven't watched becomes unavailable so I can watch the local version. It took about 2 days to setup, but probably 30 minutes with AI today.

One of the things I wish I could solve better, was a way to search for and show decent search results that you could then pipe into `yt-dlp`. Every method of doing this I've seen is basically a "hack" and often breaks or doesn't work at all. Anyone have a better solution to this that lets you basically build a frontend/proxy to Youtube or lets you Search, Show results and Download what you want to see lateR?

Downloading your favourite stuff is absolutely what you should do, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem.

Many from my generation, who grew up during an era of information scarcity, have huge stashes of hoarded data. But what can we do with it? There is no way to legally share it, so we take it with us in our graves.

I did so with regards from Tales from the crypt; the early seasons were great, so I have them locally. Or, at the least the better ones; some are not so good.

For this purpose I also kept list, in .yml files, for the most recent URL. Not just on youtube but also dailymotion etc...

Interestingly there are some surges of URLs suddenly being eliminated. Naturally we know the copyright mafia is trying to hinder us, the people here, but it is interesting how that works. Because ... it sometimes works. And then it does not work. Which is quite strange to me.

For instance, you can often still find new videos on youtube here, even full movies. Sometimes you can download them; then suddenly they are gone, but they were up before that for months or even years. So it is really really strange to see some videos suddenly vanishing, others being around for decades literally. Even when you'd assume these have ... "copyright issues".

I regret not archiving all the videos from the youtuber Myles Power (pseudoscience-debunker). He was one of my more favorite YouTubers but a few years ago he nuked his entire channel and all the videos on it (I suspect because his employer didn't like him arguing with people on the internet).

I wanted to rewatch some of his videos recently and as far as I can tell most of his videos are now lost media. I should have downloaded them when I had the chance.

Rather than using Tdarr, wouldn't it be simpler to use yt-dlp's `--recode-video` option?

I've always downloaded entire YT channels I enjoyed. I now have free/forever access to tons of content that now sits behind paywalls on topics I care about.

All automated for years

Is this another yt-dlp wrapper?

Every time you watch a youtube video you are downloading the youtube video to disk. It is just to prevent the lawyers from exploding that we all pretend that deleting it afterword means it never was downloaded.

But yes, everyone should be not deleting the videos they've downloaded.