Technology

It only takes a couple of times to realize how quickly something you care about can be taken away and you'll never see/hear it again. Netflix brought on such convenience. I remember I watched Scrubs front to back multiple times, until one day I was told that it was leaving and suddenly I couldn't watch it anymore.

Youtubers and creators come and go, if there is something you care about it's on you to preserve it. No one else will.

I wish there was a legal way for me to create a "backup" version for others to watch like a PeerTube instance, but to creators they would see it as not fair to them, so unfortunately my collection remains private.

There's only one video I need to download.

There are yt-dlp GUIs with SponsorBlock built-in.

Warning: after using SponsorBlock and uBlock Origin for a while, using YouTube or Invidious without them is horrific.

Not just YouTube. Download everything. No exceptions.

It's silly how "the internet remembers" saying gets repeated. That was true pre-2010 roughly. These days it's evidently not that difficult for someone to be disappeared or disappear themselves from the internet.

Unless you're high profile enough or you've really angered a crowd. Nobody is going to be archiving you. Certainly nobody is dedicated enough to ensure that your content is perpetually hosted somewhere.

There are some Youtubers from the 2010 era who I used to watch. It's as if they never existed. They made their ad money and vanished.

STACHER7 FOR YT-DLP

yt-dlp is the gold standard for ripping YouTube vids (as well as vids/music from damn near anywhere else). However, yt-dlp is not particularly user friendly, like, at all. There is a GUI wrapper called Stacher7 that makes it a whole lot easier to use. It's one of the better things I've installed on my computer.

Inb4 Sam Altman says all hard drives belong in data centers.

I've been at it for months

Nothing is permanent

My dad sometimes asks me to help him find some movie from the 70s or 80s and it simply doesn't exist anymore. The internet promised me I'd never be in that situation myself. The internet lied.

I agree on principle, but on what storage? Who's with me in planning a data center heist?

In the past years I have downloaded and archived about 200 GB of my favorite YouTube videos using yt-dlp. Most of them are short or low resolution for storage reasons, so it's a lot more videos than you'd think. Now they can't be taken away from me and I can watch them whenever I want.

I usually have to download YouTube videos just to watch them… YouTube doesn’t like my browser set-up or something and purposely makes things difficult

All of us already pay for it. It's time to stop sucking corpo dick. Building a company out of garage, to exploit every angle isn't something to celebrate. That data center and that power line and power plants everyone pays for isn't a bastion to stand on. Everyone is paying for it. It's not magic, the content creators are being grifted as well.

It's funny that this post comes up in my feed, given I've been spending weeks customizing yt-dlp for my use case.

In particular, if it is a niche where you are a specialist, so you can judge the importance, and you know the general public does not know much about it. Those are most likely to become lost forever if your saved link fails you one day.

I give you all permission to download mine.

Please just credit anything you might use and tag my channel. Cheers.

I hope, really hope I can find a deal on two 8TB nas drives for my home server on black friday so I can finally bring it online after a yearof waiting for better perices...

Everyone told me, why are you keeping all those harddrives with old movies and media and porn and comic books and books and audio lectures and all that shit. Why you hoarding it?

And after thirty years I was like, you know what, maybe they're right. I'm just hoarding at this point.

But then I check online and shit is disappearing forever. I knew it would happen 30 years ago, and took precautions. It may not be much but I did my part.

I'm downloading DBZ Abridged

Yt-dlp is great! I used it it to download podcasts from Youtube so I could listen on my phone. Only later I discovered I can download straight through Pipepipe(youtube client). I actually even used it shortly for regular videos as well to watch them through VLC just so at the end of the day I wouldn't get hooked on youtube shorts and the rest of the nonsense on the front page.

Yt-dlp also works for most social media sites. X, Tiktok, etc...

Not sure about the value of downloading videos for the sake of storing them (after you've watched them) tho. I rarely rewatch videos.

Been doing it for more than a decade... and never stop

Still trying to get all my favorite flash videos...

Harry Potter vs DBZ on Newgrounds two decades later is still funnier than everything YouTube pushes out.