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The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

(windowsread.me)
428 points Leftium | 1 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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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.

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1. matheusmoreira ◴[20 Sep 25 09:17 UTC] No.45311732[source]▶
> In general, I think people are way too casual about media of all kinds silently disappearing when you're not looking.

I used to be obsessed with this.

The way I saw it was the universe took billions of years of concerted effort to generate a random number that represents a unique file such as an interesting video or image. It would be such a shame if all that effort was invalidated due to bullshit YouTube reasons or copyright nonsense or link rot or whatever.

So I started hoarding this data. I started buying hardware and designing a home data center with ZFS and hundreds of terabytes to hold it all. I started downloading things I never actually gave a shit about just because they were rare and I wanted to preserve them.

I think getting married cured me of this. Now it's all moments that will be lost to time, like tears in the rain.