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.
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.
EDIT: Many good comments, but they all suffer from
one blind spot, so I answer here instead of individually.
A lot of content is only legal because it is on YouTube (or any other platform that has deals with the content industry). Sure, we can share illegally in a way that is obscure enough that no one gets sued. But what help is that, eventually it will get either popular and sued out of existence or forgotten and fade.
Then there is old content that is not legally shareable at all, like old game ROMs. Plenty of millennial stuff there but the Gen-X world is already half forgotten.
Cooyright is just too
long and too unreliable. What we need at least is exemptions from Copyright for archivists, otherwise a lot of stuff will
simply be lost in the coming decades.
I agree with the sentiment (and have several TB of archived Youtube videos) but I can't help but think "Keep this on the down-low!". I feel the same way every time someone mentions Youtube RSS feeds (which drive my archiving rig). Keep quiet or they'll take them away!
I don't see why there can't be a way to download vids directly from creators with micropayments. That way the user gets something as it was intended. If there was some kind of link that could go in the vid description, it would be great.
I suppose re-sharing would be the problem - but that may only occur in some instances. And it might not happen immediately either. If it does happen, if there was a way for creators to collect tips, that'd make it more feasible if their videos spread far and wide.
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?
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.
In addition to what's included in the post, I'll recommend Tube Archivist as a self-hosted solution. Utilizes yt-dlp, you can configure download speeds to avoid getting temporarily blocked, handles subscriptions and playlists. I've been enjoying it!
I very rarely watch Youtube videos more than once. Sometimes I download concert videos (because I like to collect those), but otherwise the vast majority of content that I watch just isn't "worth it" for me to archive.
Haven't seen anyone else mention it, but the yt-dlp command line option:
"--sponsorblock-remove all"
has been immensely useful to me as well. The sponsorblock plugin and yt-dlp interop was one of the best things out there ever invented until the marketers fought back and DDOS'd it and made it hard to contribute 'ignore' timestamps for new videos for most users. Still really good for older videos though.
I'm doing this for years already after I realized a lot of my "favorites" (remember when they were called like this?) weren't available anymore and YT doesn't even show the title, so chances are high you won't even know what's missing. This will be a source of nostalgia at some point.
I’m using Pinchflat for my homelab setup. All I need to do is add videos to specific YouTube playlists. I’ve scheduled Pinchflat to automatically download videos from those playlists periodically. Works great with zero hassle.
Archiving is a given in today's tech ecosystem, I personally use Youtarr (https://github.com/DialmasterOrg/Youtarr) to archive all my playlists and some channels I really want to save.
The other year I came to the same conclusion so I built a web frontend for yt-dlp with queue support. I have 'profiles' that I can pick from at the time of download that allow custom yt-dlp configs to be active at any given time, which routes videos to different locations and jellyfin being one of those locations.
fyi: filesystems have max path length/byte count limits, and yt-dlp can exceed that(e.g. "/var/home/username/Documents/Videos/YouTube/Five-reasons-you-want-powdered-detergents-for-your-dishwasher-fourth-one-surprises-you.mp4.part.012" > $THE_MAX_LEN). If this happens, it throws a Python `[Errno 36] File name too long` error and yt-dlp gives up.
This can be mitigated by adding `-o "%(title).150B [%(id)s].%(ext)s" ` to command line, which trims filenames to 150 bytes max. There are other options like --trim-filenames, but yt-dlp don't apply those to the interim part files and that triggers the failure anyway. The relevant issue has been reported on GH years ago and closed by the maintaining author with no PR from me(hey).
But also? Let things die. Let them languish half-remembered for years until they're gone forever. (Until they're not and then are again.) Let things go. What's that, your 'tism won't let you? Learn to. Grow. (Is that effectively impossible for some? Sure. But clearly that's a different problem. If you're reading this, most likely you can accomplish it.) I'm glad we have the Internet Archive and all those amazing things. But I'm convinced that just because it is technologically possible to personally save everything forever, it is in most cases entirely unnecessary and probably ultimately unhealthy.
recently i tried finding one of those inside-joke videos, only to realize it's been removed. i can't find it anywhere now :(
i make references to it now and then, and it feels very sad that i didn't archive it.
this specific video was called "Rock to bottom", a half blend between song and joke, with these quotes crammed into it:
- "You drink too much Co-Cola, feel like you just can't stop?"
- "You check Facebook, even at funeral?"
- "You watch more reality television, than actual reality?"
Around 2018, someone had done a lot of work and there were videos like "The Adventures of Tyrion the Imp (Season 1)" in Youtube. They had taken all Tyrion's storyline scenes from all the episodes, and put them together in one video. And they had done these for all of the Game of Thrones main characters, so there were lots of these videos.
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'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.
just fyi, youtube premium lite is $7.99 a month (subscribe via web, not App store), removes in-video ads and allows downloads. at that price it’s just worth it for me.
It's already too late. YouTube has not given me any new favorite videos in 10+ years. And all of the older videos that were my favorites have disappeared, or worse, been inadvertently but predictably bit-rotted because someone at YouTube thought it was a good idea to forcibly re-transcode all old videos, making them look like smeared lossy JPEGs and de-syncing the audio.
Sharing only because it's relevant, I built this for myself. It uses your browser's cookies/sessions to find stuff you liked and favorited, and downloads it locally using yt-dlp and a sqlite database.
It works really well! And it's all free, open source, and built with Rust to make the footprint as small as possible.
It also has a cool TV mode where you can pick a channel (tiktok/youtube/instagram) and it autoplays stuff at random, even has cool "tandas" videos for in-between to make it feel more authentic. Check it out!
There is a solution to this for videos you upload from now on. The problem is decoupling persistence and access. Imagine a decentralized network where you could “pin” videos the way you do in IPFS, but they’d be streamed and end-to-end encrypted.
Websites could ask their visitors to keep a tab open and their browsers will automatically store chunks (and earn safebux for serving videos, if they want to turn that on). This was designed to be far simpler than IPFS, with no “sealing” … just open a browser tab and get paid.
The real interesting part is when it connects with Safebox remote attestation. Here you can prove that the server has not been compromised, and that together with HTTPS proves that the JS is official. You don’t need men with guns for DRM or copyright… you can enforce it this way. An individual user might hack the JS they got but someone else can’t distribute the hack at scale (unless it is with a rogue jailbroken browser). The Jets in safecloud wouldn’t release the chunks unless there was a recent assertion + TPM attestation from the Safebox serving the player iframe.
This way you can enforce revenue streams like “pay per minute” and have the client side actually enforce it for nearly all users.
Does anyone have a better solution for watching this stuff on my TV? I'm not thrilled with using Jellyfin for this purpose because of the limitations (some in the article, others not) but also because I have a lovely Jellyfin library of actual TV and movies that I don't want to gum up.
Ideally I want videos on my home server organised into arbitrary folders and a nice simple video player on my Android TV that I can browse the folder tree with. Just like the old days. I don't care about accessing this stuff outside of my home network.
Somewhere in early 2013 some ethical hacker communities had tooling to share the hashes and general metadata of downloaded videos from Youtube so that "spy marks" could be detected.
At the time I was already concerned that what would later be called deep fakes would be abused by big sites to mass-manipulate the bifurcated segments of the larger population in near real-time. At that time in 2013 I was told I must be smoking some really good shit, and perhaps I was.
But now in 2026 about twelve years after Google's primitive artificial neural networks showed us an on-silicon view of tripping balls in a grocery store, and now the mediocre enthusiasts both technical and not are no longer like "oh yeah that's cool man" but has been exposed to what artificial neural networks are doing day to day, the concern for targeted convincing-as-totally highly manipulative edits of hour long podcasts is not so "out there".
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".
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.
>The corporate internet is hostile to art and the things you love
Agreed. I mourn the deletion of legendary Hair cake video from FilthyFrank every now and then. But at least we have AI slop videos or in better case videos with "The inevitable rise and fall of XXX" title" with human narrator reading AI written script. But hey at least everyone censor word fck and sht.
Backing up videos seems increasingly a consideration, it's disappointing to see videos I've organized and paid for via Youtube Premium to support creators and invest in organizing meaningful playlists.
One thing i would add is to not do this on your main youtube account, you can export the playlist and then use a throwaway account, i've heard tales of them throttling or banning people who download too much, especially with AI companies probably trying to download the whole of youtube.
Download your favourite YouTube videos
(criminallyvulgar.dev)390 points by surprisetalk 5 November 2026 | 185 comments
Comments
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.
EDIT: Many good comments, but they all suffer from one blind spot, so I answer here instead of individually.
A lot of content is only legal because it is on YouTube (or any other platform that has deals with the content industry). Sure, we can share illegally in a way that is obscure enough that no one gets sued. But what help is that, eventually it will get either popular and sued out of existence or forgotten and fade.
Then there is old content that is not legally shareable at all, like old game ROMs. Plenty of millennial stuff there but the Gen-X world is already half forgotten.
Cooyright is just too long and too unreliable. What we need at least is exemptions from Copyright for archivists, otherwise a lot of stuff will simply be lost in the coming decades.
> This is the only yt-dlp wrapper that allowed me to properly maintain the Playlist structure to any extent
I have the same requirement and it's possible to do it with the default yt-dlp:
yt-dlp --embed-metadata --parse-metadata "playlist_index:%(track_number)s" "PLAYLIST_URL"
I suppose re-sharing would be the problem - but that may only occur in some instances. And it might not happen immediately either. If it does happen, if there was a way for creators to collect tips, that'd make it more feasible if their videos spread far and wide.
"--sponsorblock-remove all"
has been immensely useful to me as well. The sponsorblock plugin and yt-dlp interop was one of the best things out there ever invented until the marketers fought back and DDOS'd it and made it hard to contribute 'ignore' timestamps for new videos for most users. Still really good for older videos though.
My arguments line for the extension looks something like this:
This can be mitigated by adding `-o "%(title).150B [%(id)s].%(ext)s" ` to command line, which trims filenames to 150 bytes max. There are other options like --trim-filenames, but yt-dlp don't apply those to the interim part files and that triggers the failure anyway. The relevant issue has been reported on GH years ago and closed by the maintaining author with no PR from me(hey).
i make references to it now and then, and it feels very sad that i didn't archive it.
this specific video was called "Rock to bottom", a half blend between song and joke, with these quotes crammed into it: - "You drink too much Co-Cola, feel like you just can't stop?" - "You check Facebook, even at funeral?" - "You watch more reality television, than actual reality?"
At some point, all those videos were removed.
1. Vibed a firefox extension that polls my youtube watch later list and saves as bookmarks
2. Vibed a second firefox extension that syncs bookmarks to a self-hosted karakeep (bookmark manager)
3. Configured karakeep to download videos from youtube bookmarks (it uses yt-dlp internally).
It's pretty nifty.
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.
All automated for years
Download your favorite tiktok videos, though.
It works really well! And it's all free, open source, and built with Rust to make the footprint as small as possible.
It also has a cool TV mode where you can pick a channel (tiktok/youtube/instagram) and it autoplays stuff at random, even has cool "tandas" videos for in-between to make it feel more authentic. Check it out!
https://github.com/sergiotapia/joyscroller
Websites could ask their visitors to keep a tab open and their browsers will automatically store chunks (and earn safebux for serving videos, if they want to turn that on). This was designed to be far simpler than IPFS, with no “sealing” … just open a browser tab and get paid.
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...
It works now, you can try it locally:
https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud
The real interesting part is when it connects with Safebox remote attestation. Here you can prove that the server has not been compromised, and that together with HTTPS proves that the JS is official. You don’t need men with guns for DRM or copyright… you can enforce it this way. An individual user might hack the JS they got but someone else can’t distribute the hack at scale (unless it is with a rogue jailbroken browser). The Jets in safecloud wouldn’t release the chunks unless there was a recent assertion + TPM attestation from the Safebox serving the player iframe.
This way you can enforce revenue streams like “pay per minute” and have the client side actually enforce it for nearly all users.
@tptacek you would love Safecloud I think
Ideally I want videos on my home server organised into arbitrary folders and a nice simple video player on my Android TV that I can browse the folder tree with. Just like the old days. I don't care about accessing this stuff outside of my home network.
At the time I was already concerned that what would later be called deep fakes would be abused by big sites to mass-manipulate the bifurcated segments of the larger population in near real-time. At that time in 2013 I was told I must be smoking some really good shit, and perhaps I was.
But now in 2026 about twelve years after Google's primitive artificial neural networks showed us an on-silicon view of tripping balls in a grocery store, and now the mediocre enthusiasts both technical and not are no longer like "oh yeah that's cool man" but has been exposed to what artificial neural networks are doing day to day, the concern for targeted convincing-as-totally highly manipulative edits of hour long podcasts is not so "out there".
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".
But yes, everyone should be not deleting the videos they've downloaded.
Agreed. I mourn the deletion of legendary Hair cake video from FilthyFrank every now and then. But at least we have AI slop videos or in better case videos with "The inevitable rise and fall of XXX" title" with human narrator reading AI written script. But hey at least everyone censor word fck and sht.