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!
Sooner or later all these streaming first movies and shows that had zero physical release will start to go missing or in limbo when these companies go under and people will wonder where they can find them.
I know a lot of the shows I enjoy watching on netflix will be gone someday unless I start backing them up now.
That’s why I pay for some streaming services but never actually use them to watch shows. If you know what I mean? ;)
If a show you like is still running, might not hurt to “watch” the show in the background to ensure additional seasons get made.
They already do. https://movieweb.com/bryan-cranston-on-the-one-and-only-ivan/
It’s TF1 (one), not TFI :crying:
A user upscaled Britney Spear music videos using AI.
Care to share ? :D
I learned this one the hard way. I am an NBA fan and YouTube used to be a bastion of full games from 80 - early 2000s.
I started archiving, but then the Last Dance happened and the NBA scrubbed the Internet of all old full games.
I got half way through backing up all the 90s bulls championships before the purge and it still bugs me.
It’s annoying when you know they where there at some point and you just never got to them. At least they actually published som classic games on YT during the pandemic and most (all?) of them are still there. I have archived them of course :)
My thing is I just want something to watch my personal playlists/ favorites and save them so I never have that “this video was removed” problem again.
However, I don’t know what can do it. I tried TubeArchivist and another one using their Docker containers in my Unraid server but it doesn’t really do what I’m trying.
Wow, a Koh-Lanta reference outside of r/survivor. Not something I expected.
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.
I’ve been having a helluva time finding Sesame Street episodes from the 70s.
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.
Indeed, so many videos I took for granted disappeared later. Max the storage, max the network speed… hoard everything!
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!
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.
it’s just such a shame that yt liked playlist got completely privated some years ago so you can’t automatically download everything
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.
I use an automated Downloader to download subscribed videos when they are uploaded to watch at my convience ad free.