←back to thread

The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

(windowsread.me)
439 points Leftium | 1 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.237s | source
Show context
peteforde ◴[20 Sep 25 01:23 UTC] No.45308944[source]▶
One of the things that drives me crazy about YouTube is that if a video gets taken down, it shows up as a "This video is no longer available" with no further metadata. I am far, far more uptight about no knowing which video was removed than I am about the fact that it is no longer available.

I have put serious thought into creating a tool that would automatically yt-dlp every video I open to a giant hard drive and append a simple index with the title, channel, thumbnail and date.

In general, I think people are way too casual about media of all kinds silently disappearing when you're not looking.

replies(7): >>45309263 #>>45309876 #>>45311419 #>>45311593 #>>45311732 #>>45312005 #>>45312465 #
1. globular-toast ◴[20 Sep 25 08:45 UTC] No.45311593[source]▶
I want a web cache that runs on my network transparently caching everything that goes through it. It would be a LRU cache but with the ability to easily mark some resource as archived such that it never gets deleted. A browser extension could be used to do this marking. Unfortunately client-side js makes this very difficult or even impossible to do.

We really dropped the ball when it came to running random js from websites. The number of people who truly run only free software these days is close to zero. I used to block all js about 10 years ago but it was a losing battle and ended up being essentially an opt out from society.