Most of my YouTube playlists say something like "15 unavailable videos are hidden", or about ~10% for a 5 years old playlist. The same ratio holds true for most bookmarks of YouTube videos I have.
There's videos from ~15 years ago that I consider gone for good - lost to the great copyright apocalypse - having been unable to find them anywhere on the today's internet.
Same experience. I have years of notes and many link to specific youtube video sources (with time stamp). Unfortunately those URLs don't even give a title of a video, so tracking down removed videos can be hard. However, I've had some luck using LLMs! (obviously only when I can remember the context of a quote or some details about the video, even if vague). Once you know the video title it can often be found on unofficial youtube mirror sites.
I've had luck going to my liked videos, hitting the 3 dots under "Liked videos", selecting "Show unavailable videos", and copying the video watch?= ID into google. If the video is popular enough its text should pop up in a forum somewhere with some discussion at least where you'll find the right clues. Example: 9_1Qn370IIY
Downloading your favourite stuff is absolutely what you should do, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem.
Many from my generation, who grew up during an era of information scarcity, have huge stashes of hoarded data. But what can we do with it? There is no way to legally share it, so we take it with us in our graves.
I suppose you can distribute YouTube videos the same you distribute Linux ISOs. Hell, something like IPFS (RIP(?)) would work even better for random videos than it ever did for Linux ISOs.
One of the things I wish I could solve better, was a way to search for and show decent search results that you could then pipe into `yt-dlp`. Every method of doing this I've seen is basically a "hack" and often breaks or doesn't work at all. Anyone have a better solution to this that lets you basically build a frontend/proxy to Youtube or lets you Search, Show results and Download what you want to see lateR?
It's rate-limited but other hacks to scrape Youtube without the API will also be rate-limited as well unless you try to trick Google via unapproved hostile methods such as commanding an army of residential ip zombies and aggregate it.
Fundamentally, the index of Youtube videos lives in Google's servers so you're beholden to Google to get results from it. If the issue is that the Google's official results from search queries are not surfacing the videos you think are actually there, it means you'd have to build a duplicate (massive) "shadow" index to return those missing videos. To build such a beast, you're back to hitting the brick wall of rate-limits again.
What hacks have you found? I guess my first thought is some sort of snippet to run in the browser console, or an extension, that you can just run when using youtube itself that copies the yt-dlp command to downloads all the page's search results to your clipboard. Definitely a hack I'm just curious what else you've seen.
copy(
'yt-dlp ' +
[...document.querySelectorAll('ytd-video-renderer a#video-title')]
.map(a => {
const u = new URL(a.href);
return `"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=${u.searchParams.get('v')}"`;
})
.join(' ')
)
Due to the nature of youtube updating so often all methods utilizing youtube's search would break often, but in the age of coding agents I don't think it matters as much anymore. Tell that to claude code and it will do it in 15 minutes. Being annoyed with youtube's search interface regressions I've basically built something similar by having an alternative frontend to better sort by date ranges, view count etc. It has already broken twice in last 6 months but fixing it is trivial by pointing a coding agent at it. The way it works is by piping the search query to automated playwright browser which returns the parsed search results and thumbnails. Also dabbled with Youtube's API in the past which sometimes shows results that don't show up on its regular search.
i use freetube to search. i can select videos that i want to watch with a single click into a playlist and then export that playlist and feed it to yt-dlp. since my internet is often slow, that is the main way i watch videos. i don't even open them directly in freetube, but wait until yt-dlp is done downloading.
Since youtube api won't help with this someone needs to build a video index and a good search algorithm on top. Would be nice to be able to search through indexed subtitles too.
Freetube but if you want HD you have to separate out the video and audio downloads then combine them after. A little annoying but it does have download right there in the client
Podsync will download videos from a playlist and then publish an XML feed of videos it's downloaded. You can set it up so that you interact with it by just adding videos to a (public or unlisted) playlist.
It's intended to be used as a youtube-to-podcast-player tool, but seems like it fits your use, too.
I have a nightly job that looks at all my youtube playlists, and downloads them to disk. It also sends me an email whenever a video that I haven't watched becomes unavailable so I can watch the local version. It took about 2 days to setup, but probably 30 minutes with AI today.
would be interested to have a look if you happened to have a repo setup or a blog post explaining! prob won't necessarily setup something myself but always been curious about this kind of thing
Read the comments and combined with my personal experience, made me wanna have a full on offline library, and in a better case, "decentralized" libraries of such things, although at the very least videos prolly won't work all that well.
I regret not archiving all the videos from the youtuber Myles Power (pseudoscience-debunker). He was one of my more favorite YouTubers but a few years ago he nuked his entire channel and all the videos on it (I suspect because his employer didn't like him arguing with people on the internet).
I wanted to rewatch some of his videos recently and as far as I can tell most of his videos are now lost media. I should have downloaded them when I had the chance.
I did so with regards from Tales from the crypt; the
early seasons were great, so I have them locally.
Or, at the least the better ones; some are not so good.
For this purpose I also kept list, in .yml files, for
the most recent URL. Not just on youtube but also dailymotion
etc...
Interestingly there are some surges of URLs suddenly being
eliminated. Naturally we know the copyright mafia is trying
to hinder us, the people here, but it is interesting how that
works. Because ... it sometimes works. And then it does not
work. Which is quite strange to me.
For instance, you can often still find new videos on youtube
here, even full movies. Sometimes you can download them; then
suddenly they are gone, but they were up before that for months
or even years. So it is really really strange to see some videos
suddenly vanishing, others being around for decades literally.
Even when you'd assume these have ... "copyright issues".
I've always downloaded entire YT channels I enjoyed. I now have free/forever access to tons of content that now sits behind paywalls on topics I care about.
Every time you watch a youtube video you are downloading the youtube video to disk. It is just to prevent the lawyers from exploding that we all pretend that deleting it afterword means it never was downloaded.
But yes, everyone should be not deleting the videos they've downloaded.
to the layman download means the whole video is stored in its entirety on my disk. and possibly to lawyers too. that is not happening with streaming videos. youtube videos in particular most likely never hit the disk. not even the cache. when i am watching youtube then i am not deleting the video after it is done. the "downloaded" segments disappear automatically as i watch. so there is no delete step that i could skip in order to keep the file. rather, actually downloading a video requires an entirely different operation.
Technically watching a video only streams video chunks into memory. But of course there are tools pretending to be a youtube client to stream it to a file.
There's videos from ~15 years ago that I consider gone for good - lost to the great copyright apocalypse - having been unable to find them anywhere on the today's internet.
Many from my generation, who grew up during an era of information scarcity, have huge stashes of hoarded data. But what can we do with it? There is no way to legally share it, so we take it with us in our graves.
Not sure what you're exactly asking for. Google/Youtube does provide an "official" API for youtube searches:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/data/reference/rest/v3...
It's rate-limited but other hacks to scrape Youtube without the API will also be rate-limited as well unless you try to trick Google via unapproved hostile methods such as commanding an army of residential ip zombies and aggregate it.
Fundamentally, the index of Youtube videos lives in Google's servers so you're beholden to Google to get results from it. If the issue is that the Google's official results from search queries are not surfacing the videos you think are actually there, it means you'd have to build a duplicate (massive) "shadow" index to return those missing videos. To build such a beast, you're back to hitting the brick wall of rate-limits again.
> API key not valid. Please pass a valid API key.
A script that streams clipboard changes.
Next i run a bunch of user services that do:
`await-clipboard.sh | grep --line-buffered -z -e "youtu" | ...`
I just use youtube like normal, but instead of clicking a video i right-click copy to clipboard and a mpv+sponsorblock window pops up
Since youtube api won't help with this someone needs to build a video index and a good search algorithm on top. Would be nice to be able to search through indexed subtitles too.
It's intended to be used as a youtube-to-podcast-player tool, but seems like it fits your use, too.
That's kinda the nature of YouTube downloaders/scrapers including yt-dlp. It's not exactly a public API that YouTube's offering to support.
I wanted to rewatch some of his videos recently and as far as I can tell most of his videos are now lost media. I should have downloaded them when I had the chance.
For this purpose I also kept list, in .yml files, for the most recent URL. Not just on youtube but also dailymotion etc...
Interestingly there are some surges of URLs suddenly being eliminated. Naturally we know the copyright mafia is trying to hinder us, the people here, but it is interesting how that works. Because ... it sometimes works. And then it does not work. Which is quite strange to me.
For instance, you can often still find new videos on youtube here, even full movies. Sometimes you can download them; then suddenly they are gone, but they were up before that for months or even years. So it is really really strange to see some videos suddenly vanishing, others being around for decades literally. Even when you'd assume these have ... "copyright issues".
All automated for years
But yes, everyone should be not deleting the videos they've downloaded.
Yes, that's exactly what it means.