[HN Gopher] Browser extension and local backend that automatical...
___________________________________________________________________
Browser extension and local backend that automatically archives
YouTube videos
Author : fcpguru
Score : 199 points
Date : 2025-08-02 16:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| fcpguru wrote:
| ~/os/starchive (main)[56daf7] $ ls -lh data
|
| total 3207312
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 525M Aug 2 09:11 2PMzaym-StM.mov
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 362M Aug 2 09:10 CHbawkGc_os.mov
|
| -rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 658M Aug 2 09:11 lqR7VV8ftys.mov
|
| ~/os/starchive (main)[56daf7] $ ./starachive
|
| Server starting on port 3009...
|
| JSON received: map[videoId:CHbawkGc_os]
|
| Added video CHbawkGc_os to queue. Queue length: 1
|
| Processing video CHbawkGc_os. Remaining in queue: 0
| computegabe wrote:
| Interesting. I was looking into creating an extension that
| manually manipulates and intercepts the vnd.yt-ump [1] requests,
| then use webcodecs to process everything in the browser.
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/gsuberland/UMP_Format/blob/main/UMP_Forma...
| fcpguru wrote:
| oh wow, yeah https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp sounds like the
| easier path.
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> Videos are saved to the . /data/ directory and converted to
| MOV format using ffmpeg with hardware acceleration_
|
| Transcoded (ouch) or just remuxed to a mov container? Have to
| investigate.
| atahanacar wrote:
| Relevant lines:
| https://github.com/andrewarrow/starchive/blob/136030c6ef11a5...
| fcpguru wrote:
| the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't
| like the youtube video format. But the audio can just be
| copied. My mac's fan never spins with the hardware acceleration
| so it runs in the background and I just forget about it.
| ahoef wrote:
| I detest QuickTime more than any other piece of software
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Why does Apple take the effort to maintain and ship different
| encoding libraries? I would've expected to both the Safari
| engine and Quicktime to simply depend on
| libappleavsmth.dylib?
| fcpguru wrote:
| wow i went down an AI rabbit whole learning the answer to
| this: https://chatgpt.com/share/688e818d-67ac-8010-913d-618
| f3534f1...
| 1718627440 wrote:
| First of all how do you know it's true?
|
| That being said, that makes zero sense. Just linking to a
| library, doesn't precluded using a protocol over a socket
| to talk to a graphic/audio server. Access control like
| remote code isolation (webAPIs), CORS and DRM also don't
| change anything about decoding and mixing video streams.
| fcpguru wrote:
| Well try and use yt-dlp to get an mp4 from YouTube that
| will open in quicktime. Can't be done.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Haven't refuted that. I expect this to be due to an
| incompatible codec though, is it?
| Teever wrote:
| yeah but this presupposes that the optimal usage pattern here
| is to use quicktime instead of VLC or something like
| Jellyfin.
|
| Which seems a little short sighted to me. VLC or Jellyfin are
| obviously superior because they're accessible across multiple
| platforms.
| latexr wrote:
| Seems likely the reason is they want to easily load videos
| into mobile Apple devices like an iPhone or iPad. While
| alternative video players exist for those platforms,
| management may not be as convenient.
| fcpguru wrote:
| you can pass in --format mkv
|
| the default is mov
| latexr wrote:
| > the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime
| doesn't like the youtube video format.
|
| That's not true at all. QuickTime is far from the best video
| player, but it's also not entirely worthless. It can play
| "modern" popular formats like H264 MP4, which is exactly what
| YouTube recommends.
|
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en
| fcpguru wrote:
| Show me a screen recording of this working. Run yt-dlp and
| get an mp4 and open in quicktime. I get error every time
| single.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Yeah I was onboard until the re-encoding part: yt-dlp maintains
| the exact bits, why on earth would someone want to waste
| encoding time just to trash the quality?
|
| On top of that... seriously, of all the formats one could
| choose, MOV?! Might as well choose DivX or RealVideo.
| fcpguru wrote:
| it's because on a mac I want to be able to open them in
| quicktime and final cut pro. The mp4 format youtube uses
| isn't something quicktime can open.
|
| But I gave you a cli param of --format
|
| Default is mov but you can pass in mkv
| WithinReason wrote:
| Now add DHT so clients can download videos from each other as a
| torrent and you solved global video distribution.
| rwmj wrote:
| That's basically PeerTube?
| WithinReason wrote:
| PeerTube doesn't have all of youtube's videos on it
| rwmj wrote:
| Isn't that PeerTube that's going to be DMCA'd out of
| existence by Google?
| WithinReason wrote:
| Why? How is it different from yt-dlp from a DMCA
| standpoint? You're downloading a video in both cases,
| with this you're not using YouTube's server bandwidth so
| it doesn't cost them money.
| rwmj wrote:
| Because users would also be uploading, as PeerTube works
| somewhat like Bittorrent.
| WithinReason wrote:
| I never mentioned PeerTube
| rwmj wrote:
| Whether or not it's actual PeerTube, you're describing
| something that would have to work like PeerTube, since
| you can't do peer to peer video sharing without some
| people uploading, and so inevitably it's going to be
| DMCA'd out of existence as soon as Google find it.
|
| (Note to self: Never wrestle with a pig ...)
| WithinReason wrote:
| You're not downloading anything you couldn't already
| download from YouTube with yt-dlp
| erinnh wrote:
| Ive been using Tubearchivist with the extension for this.
|
| https://github.com/tubearchivist/browser-extension
|
| I really like the WebUI of Tubearchivist itself.
| fcpguru wrote:
| the main feature I want is to just browse youtube like normal
| in firefox like I always do. And completely forget starchive is
| running. Then later in the day I'm pleasntly suprised that any
| video I want to clip is already downloaded and ready. I never
| know which one I'll want to download and I don't want to have
| to click any button.
| nemomarx wrote:
| What are you clipping them for?
| fcpguru wrote:
| Usually thoughout the day I'll be watching many different
| videos and then one will stick with me. Someone will have
| made a really good point at like time code 3 mins and 17
| seconds or something. If I have to right then and there
| pause the video and start a download it takes me out of the
| moment. I like it so much better to just at the end of the
| day go back and find good moments and place them in a their
| own videos. Examples:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksHaSnEs4WM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRfsAufKrzk
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EoH-Qy_xw8
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Cool but ... this also sounds like hording behavior. The number
| of things I've saved over the years only to throw them away years
| later and realize that saving them in the first place was a waste
| of time.
|
| In the 90s my friend's mom would video tape AMC movies. She had
| 300+ tapes. Maybe she had a few rare ones but now all those
| movies are available on demand either legally or illegally and in
| much better quality. Another friend kept all of his 1980s
| computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy
| boxes through 30+ years of moves. I doubt he ever opened a single
| magazine since the moment he saved them. Then they all appeared
| on The Archive and he finally got rid of them.
|
| To be clear, I have a few youtube videos saved on my local
| storage. I'm just thinking that saving every video I watch
| reminds me of the things I've personally over-saved.
|
| Actually that reminds me. I met up with the magazine saving
| friend recently which is when I verified that he finally got rid
| of his stash. It made me think about things I'm still saving that
| if I reflect on I know I will never actually look at. For example
| I have box of about eight 3.5 inch floppy disks from my Amiga
| days. The odds that I'm going to get an Amiga or download an
| Amiga emu and get a drive to read those are close enough to zero
| that I should throw them away. Similarly I have a book of CD-ROMs
| of backed up data from the 90s. There's a close to 0% chance that
| I'm never going to bother look at their contents.
| fcpguru wrote:
| oh that's not why I want them local. I want to open them in
| final cut pro and edit them and use parts in other videos. I
| delete the data folder at the end of each day.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Getting them on a public shared archive is probably a good
| outcome though. There was that lady who taped hundreds of hours
| of daytime TV and archiving that has some interesting
| historical uses?
|
| But a personal copy I'm not sure has much point yeah.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Marion Marguerite Stokes (nee Butler; November 25, 1929 -
| December 14, 2012) was an American access television
| producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator,
| activist, librarian, and archivist, especially known for
| hoarding and archiving hundreds of thousands of hours of
| television news footage spanning 35 years [70,000 VHS tapes],
| from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she had been
| operating nine properties and three storage units. According
| to the Los Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019
| documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of
| recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for
| the significance of guerrilla archiving."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
|
| https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo
|
| https://recorderfilm.com/
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines
| (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through
| 30+ years of moves.
|
| I don't think IA has all early issues of the Microsoft Systems
| Journal (later MSDN Magazine), among others. So this can be
| useful. (Also, what kind of person do you think put the
| magazines up on IA in the first place?..)
| asdefghyk wrote:
| Lots magazines never made it to the archives and have been
| lost.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| They are probably still in libraries somewhere (ironically,
| a worse-funded library is better as there's less chance
| they've thrown them out to make space for newer stuff). The
| problem is locating them.
| bombcar wrote:
| Digital hoarding takes nearly no practical space.
|
| And there's a number of YouTube videos o wish I could still
| access.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Hard drives are cheap and compact. The real issue is archiving
| with no organization or indexing.
| jh00ker wrote:
| > I have a book of CD-ROMs of backed up data
|
| >There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother
| look at their contents.
|
| More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other
| family members go through your shit after you pass away and
| discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to
| share.
|
| This is something I think about a lot because I don't have a
| "digital legacy plan."
| npteljes wrote:
| Store your archive encrypted, and then later you can decide
| if you share the password or not :)
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other
| family members go through your shit after you pass away
|
| I think that's not really likely. I'm pretty sure if you poll
| you'll find that few children care about their parent's
| "stuff". You can find plenty of people who've lost parents
| who found that they didn't have any interest in going through
| their parents stuff and then from that realized their
| children would be the same to them.
|
| Most children aren't going to dig through anything more than
| a physical photo album, and when they do, the only pictures
| that are relevant to them are those with people they know.
| The rest only have meaning to the dead parent. They aren't
| going to dig through hard drives or CDs unless they are
| searching for financial documents so they can finish up their
| parent's financial affairs.
|
| > discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to
| share
|
| I do worry about that. I just tell myself I'll be dead so it
| doesn't really matter.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Where are you making this conclusion from?
|
| Nobody in my family was waiting for one of my parents to
| die and it actually happened rather suddenly although he
| was retirement age. There was a very rapid effort to ensure
| we discovered as many passwords as possible, bought a
| family NAS, and backed up his entire computer starting with
| the Lightroom video and pictures. We later went through all
| of the family photos and folders he hadn't put in there.
|
| To this day it's constantly running with an off site back
| up to my NAS. There are some photos of cousins we didn't
| really know, but he owned the best digital cameras of every
| era since their invention so it's a huge documentation of
| life. It would have been a family tragedy to lose that.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| That's family records. People care about that. I will
| hazard you probably didn't peruse their whole collection
| of books and magasines however and I think it's normal.
|
| People care about the things which remind them of their
| loved ones: prized possessions, objects with strong
| memory attached too or things they used to love as kids,
| this kind of things.
|
| The rest is well stuff.
| globalise83 wrote:
| On your deathbed, you say: "My only regret is forgetting
| where I saved my Bitcoin keys".
| hkon wrote:
| With enough space available hoarding is just thinking ahead.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I would like to be able to search old videos I've seen
| sometimes. Like to find that one recipe I saw or to pull out
| that one fact I thought I heard. Or sometimes just to listen to
| a song that later got made private or deleted outright. When
| YouTube deletes a video it doesn't even leave the title in your
| playlist so it can be frustrating to try and find the same
| thing again.
| frou_dh wrote:
| > When YouTube deletes a video it doesn't even leave the
| title in your playlist
|
| I think this was an insidious decision of YouTube. It's like
| they want to pretend that videos deleted for ToS violations
| never existed, because by default the playlist does not even
| display the "holes" that it now has, either.
| danieldk wrote:
| I am the exact opposite and sell or throw away pretty much
| everything that I don't use. I find that doing so not only
| clutters the house less, but also gives you less to worry
| about.
|
| My general rule is - if I didn't use it for a year, I don't
| need it. There are obviously some exceptions like a fire
| extinguisher (which I hope to never use) and digitized photos,
| which only go through a careful selection.
|
| I think the thing I kept the longest was a Libranet Linux 3.0
| CD set because I worked for Libra Computer Systems for a while
| and this was the release that I helped building. A few years
| ago I threw it away, I think after I saw someone uploaded it to
| archive.org. When I'm 60 and want to install it again for good
| old time's sake I can.
|
| tl;de: if you don't use something for a year, you probably
| don't need it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't get around to using plenty of things for the _first
| time_ a year after I 've purchased them. That policy in my
| life would be a nightmare of constantly rebuying stuff, or
| failing to rebuy stuff that is now gone forever.
|
| Almost everything that has become indispensable in my life
| took years to integrate into my life to any significant
| degree.
|
| "Need" is a weasel word. You don't need anything.
| redserk wrote:
| I'd own a lot less stuff if there were more opportunities
| to rent infrequently used items.
|
| As it stands, I have a workshop and electronics bench with
| many tools that will go unused for years but are critical
| when I need them and too expensive to buy and throw away.
| imtringued wrote:
| There is also the problem that people who sell their used
| stuff on classifieds think of their article to be worth
| as much of the original purchase price as possible, but
| don't think about the fact that people would rather buy
| new stuff.
|
| In reality the mindset they should be having is that the
| buyer and the seller are doing a group buy separated in
| time, which means that both paying half the price of new
| is fair and should be expected.
| latexr wrote:
| > There is also the problem that people who sell their
| used stuff on classifieds think of their article to be
| worth as much of the original purchase price as possible
|
| That is quite the frustrating state of affairs when you
| try to reduce your consumerism and buy second-hand. It's
| not that uncommon to see people selling used items at the
| same price or even more expensive than new with warranty.
| seb1204 wrote:
| I would like to hear more about this. So you buy a, say new
| air fryer, a new monitor, a new mobile phone or a new shirt
| and it takes you 12 months to first use it? Or was this
| more like I buy 3 SD cards in bulk buy might not need 3
| right now? Do you live in a remote area where online
| shopping delivery is not available? Is it just a habit?
| Honestly curious.
| janandonly wrote:
| I know > 1 people who buy a new phone, leave it in the
| box for > 3 months and then finally have the time to move
| over their data and start using the new device
| latexr wrote:
| > "Need" is a weasel word. You don't need anything.
|
| That feels uncharitable to your parent commenter. By that
| logic we'd never use "need", and your use of "significant"
| would also be a weasel word (I don't believe it is, merely
| making a point).
|
| While the words used are important, we should strive to
| understand _the idea_ being transmitted and steelman the
| argument. "Need" is relational. Some things you need to
| survive (even if technically you don't _need_ to live, and
| here we're getting too philosophical), other things you
| need to feel comfortable, or you may need a chair to reach
| a high place. In this case your parent commenter is clearly
| referring to a subjective level of need which differs for
| each individual and trying to make you reflect on the
| balance between the things you keep and how their existence
| in your day-to-day affects your life.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > I don't get around to using plenty of things for the
| first time a year after I've purchased them
|
| Examples always tell the story! Can you give two or three?
| stirfish wrote:
| 1. For consumables like film, or semi-consumables like
| storage media, I may buy it and sit on it for a while.
|
| 2. I might get a new [thing], but not make it to the
| [place where I can safely use [thing]] for a while
|
| 3. Videogames, or games in general
|
| 4. Idk sometimes I get depressed
| stirfish wrote:
| I'll will be buried with my box of miscellaneous cables.
| zie wrote:
| > fire extinguisher (which I hope to never use)
|
| These expire, so make sure you check yours is still good!
|
| Otherwise I agree with and do basically the same thing. I
| also make exceptions for most tools and emotional connection
| items.
| graemep wrote:
| Physical media had a much higher cost in terms of both the cost
| of the media and the space it uses so you can horde a lot more.
|
| Maybe something a bit more selective than this though!
| lukebechtel wrote:
| Yes!
|
| Hoarding is bad when it's costly, due to space, time, or
| money.
|
| Digital media hoarding is thus not bad at all!
| socalgal2 wrote:
| You have to define "cost". I have a "server" with 3
| external drives connected. One is "media" and 2 are for
| backups. I have a drawer with 11 external HD drives which I
| haven't used in years that used to be my "media" and backup
| drives. Each of those represent money (buying the drive)
| and time (copying stuff from old 1TB drives to 2TB drives
| to 4TB drives) etc....
|
| So there is a cost to digital media hording.
|
| I wanted to save the videos I'd captured from my car's
| cameras but there's ~250gb every 3-4 months or so which is
| a more money needed. Plus, if I wanted them actually
| available to access I'd need a way to plug in more drives
| live into my server so more $$$$ and I'd need to back them
| up for when the drives fail so more $$$$.
|
| So yea, there is a cost to digital media hording.
| mlyle wrote:
| The storage is cheap. The cost is keeping it online and
| the opportunity cost of gathering, maintaining, and
| preserving collections.
| graemep wrote:
| There is a cost, but it is a much lower cost. There are
| degrees of hording too - saving all the video from your
| cars cameras permanently is pretty extreme. It would also
| be a lot more expensive and difficult if you were saving
| it to videotape.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| PSA: if you have a collection or other artifacts for ingest by
| IA, I'll cover reasonable shipping costs to get them there.
| Above a certain size, they'll handle logistics of packing and
| shipping for ingest.
|
| https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
|
| Tools to make this easy exist if you already have digital
| versions.
|
| https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive
|
| And don't forget to send a few dollars if and when you can.
|
| https://archive.org/donate
|
| (no affiliation, I just like the public good)
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid
| of them.
|
| Sometimes you're the person who is uploading them to public
| archives. Because everybody else threw them all away, and you
| saved them until the technology made archiving practical
| enough.
|
| I've been replacing all of my physical media for years, but the
| reason I can do that now is because other people scan/rip and
| archive/share the stuff. You also have unique stuff that you
| may not even know is unique. When you find something in your
| house that you can't find online, scan it and you're paying
| everybody back for all of the scanning they did for you.
|
| With the CD-ROMs, you should just glide through them one by one
| and check if you can find the stuff online. If you can, throw
| them in the trash. If you can't, copy their contents to a
| folder, and throw them in the trash. Go through the folder over
| the next hour or next 20 years (however long it takes to get
| around to it) and take the things you can't find online that
| you think somebody might want, and get those things to that
| somebody (uploading to archive.org is always a good place to
| start.)
|
| edit: I know for a fact that for a lot of people, uploading
| somewhere on the internet is their standard pre-deletion
| ritual.
| attila-lendvai wrote:
| hoarding, or maybe just anti-censorship measure.
| latexr wrote:
| I agree with you on a personal level. I also collected a bunch
| of different things but eventually threw them all away and am
| now extremely selective about what I keep. I even avoid
| hoarding digital stuff.
|
| However, in your examples, the fact those things eventually
| became available in other forms is not necessarily a
| counterpoint to your acquaintances having kept them. The
| specific counterpoint being Marion Stokes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| It's only hoarding if you don't fill the collection. It also
| depends on what percent of your storage you devote to it. If I
| could store every video I ever watched locally and only pay 1%
| of my storage cost, why not?
| 6510 wrote:
| > saving them in the first place was a waste of time
|
| I think of it like this:
|
| Automatically save everything and spend time deleting the
| things I don't want to keep. vs Manually saving everything.
|
| "Don't want to keep" depends on disk space and cluttering up
| the list as it grows. Disk space is not really a thing. I use
| to have a friend who spend many hours every week cleaning up
| his 512 GB drive. He was quite obviously deleting things he
| wanted to keep but "had to" make choices. I just have enough
| drives to keep 1 to 3 copies of everything. (The single drive
| will also fail inevitably)
|
| The clutter still seems to happen even if I make the effort to
| get rid of things. Organizing it a bit, say at least by date is
| inevitable.
|
| Therefore there is nothing to be gained by wasting time saving
| things. It is more time efficient to waste time by deleting
| only enormous folders that you clearly don't need to keep
| around.
|
| Hoarding is only an appropriate term if you don't have the
| space for it. If you have an empty airplane hangar a few boxes
| of foo isn't hoarding.
| Bender wrote:
| It is hoarding behavior. I am sometimes guilty of it but I have
| no regrets. I have DVD's and CD's that either do exist online
| in a modified _and sometimes censored_ format or got cancelled
| for reasons that exist now but did not exist when the movie or
| song was created _social constructs, cancel culture, etc..._
| The original versions probably exist in some obscure place but
| I am happy with them existing in my collection as well for data
| parity purposes. The same thing occurs with online videos,
| podcasts, music and movies.
|
| I prefer to preserve the original artistic works of the
| producers, directors and screen writers. It could be I am alone
| in this endeavor and perhaps I am just a hoarder in that
| regard. I like to watch movies or listen to songs in the way
| the artists originally intended rather than the current ways
| that society has determined I should. The exception of course
| is when a movie is re-mastered and they improve lighting,
| sound, resolution, etc...
|
| I hesitate to even imagine how AI will sloppify these great
| works in the future or how they will re-imagine podcasts. The
| original art will be lost to time and many people will never
| experience the original results of the blood sweat and tears
| that went into making them.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I'm achieving this with a single yt-dlp script reading url from a
| clipboard.
| fcpguru wrote:
| oh but there's still the thought of having to press copy. My
| favorite thing about this is I just forget I even have it
| running and browse youtube like normal. Then later anything
| I've watched that day is already downloaded.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Sounds like a waste of network and computer resources to me -
| copying url means the video is worth the effort.
| Szpadel wrote:
| I creates something similar in concept but with different goal. I
| wanted to be able to watch videos with sponsor block on iPad
| ideally using Plex.
|
| I found self hosted solution like this but I was very
| dissatisfied with how that worked
|
| on other hand I wanted to check out loco.rs framework, so I
| decided to implement my own solution.
|
| basically you are able to add channels/playlists on many many
| platforms that yt-dlp supports, you can select what should be cut
| out using sponsor block and you choice how many days you want it
| (videos older that that are automatically deleted)
|
| if you are interested, you can check it out:
| https://github.com/Szpadel/LocalTube
| amelius wrote:
| It would be nice if the extension wrote them to some shared
| repository. That way, the videos could be preserved for humanity
| without Google having a say in it.
|
| Added benefit: every video would have to be archived only once.
| Alive-in-2025 wrote:
| But then companies could sue to wipe out the centralized repo.
| So to be safe, you'd copy things to the central repo and also
| have a local copy. ;-)
|
| Next, you try to centralize all the private copies so only one
| person has to keep theirs. Solution is end copyright for things
| over x years in age. Instead in the us we keep pushing back the
| date.
| amelius wrote:
| Depends where the central server is. Nobody is wiping annas
| archive, for example.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Whoa! I asked about something like this 2 years ago but never got
| to making anything [1]! Super exciting something like this
| exists!
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37885584
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh, this is huge and important. The number of things I watch
| that're just gone when I go back to look again!
|
| Youtube is an archive like a grocery store is a food archive. [1]
|
| If it was worth watching in the first place, it's worth saving.
| Reducing the friction of doing so is going to help a lot of
| people.
|
| (1: I'm getting this quote wrong, what's the actual and
| attribution??)
| fcpguru wrote:
| ha, I'm not sure who said Youtube is a video archive like a
| grocery store is a food archive but that's excellent.
| john01dav wrote:
| There's a specific removed video that I want back (the whole
| channel seems to have been bought by someone who wanted pre
| edition subscribers or something, then everything on it was
| nuked and replaced with content that doesn't interest me). I
| tried emailing the channel's new email address to ask for it,
| and got no response. Do you know of any practical way to try to
| get it back?
| untech wrote:
| See also ArchiveBox, which supports YT saving as well, but can
| save other content too
|
| https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
| busymom0 wrote:
| My archiving app called HEAP can be configured using a simple
| apple script and yt-dlp to do this too. And since it's a native
| macOS app instead of a browser extension, it works via all
| browsers:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/heap-website-full-page-image/i...
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've had this idea myself so cool to see it implemented.
|
| What I'd really like is a kind of universal web caching backend.
| So everything I access goes through a cache and I have the option
| of viewing from cache if something goes offline or changes. I
| could also mark things as "favourite" so they don't ever expire
| from the cache. Does such a thing exist?
| fcpguru wrote:
| trying to just grab from the actual browser cache is very hard
| for video. If you look at the complexity of yt-dlp you'll see
| why that's so much easier than trying to grab various formats
| from cache.
| ProofHouse wrote:
| I don't really get the purpose of this broadly, because doesn't
| YouTube keep videos online unless the creator took them down
| which is probably not the case 95% of the time? That said for a
| niche or a high likelihood of a video being removed, or if you
| really want to be 100% certain it makes sense, but would I be
| accurate in that statement or am I missing something?
| fcpguru wrote:
| I'm not trying to save them forever. I just want them local so
| I can take clips from them for other videos. I use them as
| source input to final cut pro.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| My version of this downloads the files to my Plex filesystem so
| I can watch them on my TV without going through a Youtube app.
| Also the sponsorblock segments are cut out of my local version
| after download.
|
| I go even further and schedule TV "channels" that rotate
| through the local videos using ErsatzTV.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Would you let someone else have the power to remove books from
| your library? Oh wait, you probably are
|
| What I'll say is you're either the kind of person who gets
| fucked once then does something about it, or you just keep
| getting screwed and complain pathetically when it keeps
| happening.
| imtringued wrote:
| If you ever created a long hundred+ video playlist on YouTube
| you'd realize that videos go missing very frequently and you'll
| never know which ones are missing.
| jz10 wrote:
| I gave Claude access to supadata YT transcription and obsidian
| MCP to convert them to "permanent note" format and it's helped
| tone down my YT addiction a lot
| fcpguru wrote:
| oh wow they have free plan? https://supadata.ai/pricing nice!
| frou_dh wrote:
| For YouTube videos I feel are worth archiving, I just add them to
| playlists on my channel, then periodically download my entire
| channel using a single yt-dlp command (it can keep track of
| what's already been downloaded).
| hkt wrote:
| I've been toying with writing something like this for ages and
| now I don't have to. Brilliant work, thank you!
| lez wrote:
| It started a line of thoughts in me. What if the backend keeps
| the videos around for a longer period of time, and: * regularly
| checks youtube, and whenever one archived video gets deleted from
| youtube, it advertises the video ID on a specific set of Nostr
| relays * have a different browser extension for yt viewers that
| activates when the user hits a deleted video. * the backend can
| stream the video for continuous Bitcoin lightning payment until
| the stream is kept alive.
|
| So you can make some money on free disk space.
| quectophoton wrote:
| Related, but this is something that I would like if browsers gave
| more importance to.
|
| Literally a few moments ago I was playing a video from a Nitter
| instance (Twitter proxy), and wanted to save it with Firefox but
| nope. Firefox already has the video there, I can see in the
| developer tools that it's playing from a blob. Even if the blob
| is then modified on-the-fly, why can't I right-click it and save
| that blob that you already have? If it's a stream, why can't I
| dump it? You are already playing it, you already have the bytes,
| you can "cache" the whole playback into a local file and then let
| me Right Click -> Save that "cache" file. Had to use `yt-dlp`.
|
| Similar with bookmarks. When I bookmark something, it would be
| nice if the current state of the page were saved as a fallback
| (or at least have a checkbox for this behavior). You already have
| the rendered page right there. I can literally do `Ctrl+S` and
| save this page as it is right now, even with this half-typed
| comment. The code for saving the current state of a page is
| already there. And you can already link binary data to a bookmark
| (favicon), and text data (description, tags, etc). I wouldn't
| even mind if I have to give up the description field in exchange
| for a base64-encoded version of the bookmarked page, I'd be
| willing to accept that additional storage requirement.[1]
|
| Sites like YouTube that actively work to prevent easy downloads
| and archiving might still need extensions like the one linked in
| the submission, but browsers don't make it easy to save some data
| that they already have, and it's difficult enough to contribute
| to (or patch for yourself) those massive codebases unless you are
| already familiar with them.
|
| I'm willing to patch things for myself and repackage them for
| myself, but unfortunately for these things it's easier and more
| reliable long-term to just do workarounds.
|
| (Disclaimer: I'm using Firefox.)
|
| [1] EDIT: Having history enabled doesn't seem to do save an
| offline version, either.
| fcpguru wrote:
| Firefox (Mozilla) could be sued by youtube if they allow this.
| But yt-dlp is open-source code, maintained by a loose group of
| contributors around the world, hosted on GitHub. No central
| office, no paid service, no ad revenue. If GitHub takes it down
| (due to a DMCA request), someone will re-upload it in hours.
| This decentralization makes lawsuits costly and potentially
| ineffective.
| codethief wrote:
| Speaking of archiving data, is there a search engine that also
| returns search results from older (no-longer-existent but
| archived) web pages? The issue I've had with things like the
| Wayback Machine is that I need to recall the URL or find some
| other web page still linking to the (now broken) URL.
| fcpguru wrote:
| there is:
|
| https://timetravel.mementoweb.org
|
| https://perma.cc
|
| https://arquivo.pt
|
| https://www.bl.uk
| anthk wrote:
| https://protoweb.org
|
| https://theoldnet.com
| nottorp wrote:
| Why a backend? What's wrong with just a directory hierarchy?
| fcpguru wrote:
| You can't run yt-dlp from a browser. So the backend listens for
| a message from the browser for which video to download.
| nottorp wrote:
| Oh. I guessed it's doing its own downloading but if it isn't,
| it makes sense.
| fulafel wrote:
| DRM, you can't just save the video easily.
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