The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

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.

> This video is no longer available.

This is why I recommend everybody to stay AWAY from Youtube Music. I migrated my curated playlists from Spotify a few years ago, and to my surprise now I have dozens of songs that are no longer available and Youtube doesn’t offer a way to at least let me know which song it was. Indeed, I was a paying user and Youtube caused intentional and irretrievable data loss.

After a decade of paying for Youtube Premium I have unsubscribed and have vowed never to give them any more money whatsoever.