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Browser extension and local backend that automatically archives YouTube videos

163

Cool but ... this also sounds like hording behavior. The number of things I've saved over the years only to throw them away years later and realize that saving them in the first place was a waste of time.

In the 90s my friend's mom would video tape AMC movies. She had 300+ tapes. Maybe she had a few rare ones but now all those movies are available on demand either legally or illegally and in much better quality. Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves. I doubt he ever opened a single magazine since the moment he saved them. Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them.

To be clear, I have a few youtube videos saved on my local storage. I'm just thinking that saving every video I watch reminds me of the things I've personally over-saved.

Actually that reminds me. I met up with the magazine saving friend recently which is when I verified that he finally got rid of his stash. It made me think about things I'm still saving that if I reflect on I know I will never actually look at. For example I have box of about eight 3.5 inch floppy disks from my Amiga days. The odds that I'm going to get an Amiga or download an Amiga emu and get a drive to read those are close enough to zero that I should throw them away. Similarly I have a book of CD-ROMs of backed up data from the 90s. There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.

13 hours agoby socalgal2

Ive been using Tubearchivist with the extension for this.

https://github.com/tubearchivist/browser-extension

I really like the WebUI of Tubearchivist itself.

14 hours agoby erinnh

> Videos are saved to the ./data/ directory and converted to MOV format using ffmpeg with hardware acceleration

Transcoded (ouch) or just remuxed to a mov container? Have to investigate.

14 hours agoby mikae1

For YouTube videos I feel are worth archiving, I just add them to playlists on my channel, then periodically download my entire channel using a single yt-dlp command (it can keep track of what's already been downloaded).

9 hours agoby frou_dh

I creates something similar in concept but with different goal. I wanted to be able to watch videos with sponsor block on iPad ideally using Plex.

I found self hosted solution like this but I was very dissatisfied with how that worked

on other hand I wanted to check out loco.rs framework, so I decided to implement my own solution.

basically you are able to add channels/playlists on many many platforms that yt-dlp supports, you can select what should be cut out using sponsor block and you choice how many days you want it (videos older that that are automatically deleted)

if you are interested, you can check it out: https://github.com/Szpadel/LocalTube

12 hours agoby Szpadel

I don’t really get the purpose of this broadly, because doesn’t YouTube keep videos online unless the creator took them down which is probably not the case 95% of the time? That said for a niche or a high likelihood of a video being removed, or if you really want to be 100% certain it makes sense, but would I be accurate in that statement or am I missing something?

10 hours agoby ProofHouse

Interesting. I was looking into creating an extension that manually manipulates and intercepts the vnd.yt-ump [1] requests, then use webcodecs to process everything in the browser.

[1]: https://github.com/gsuberland/UMP_Format/blob/main/UMP_Forma...

14 hours agoby computegabe

I gave Claude access to supadata YT transcription and obsidian MCP to convert them to "permanent note" format and it's helped tone down my YT addiction a lot

9 hours agoby jz10

I'm achieving this with a single yt-dlp script reading url from a clipboard.

12 hours agoby ivanjermakov

Oh, this is huge and important. The number of things I watch that're just gone when I go back to look again!

Youtube is an archive like a grocery store is a food archive. [1]

If it was worth watching in the first place, it's worth saving. Reducing the friction of doing so is going to help a lot of people.

(1: I'm getting this quote wrong, what's the actual and attribution??)

11 hours agoby myself248

Whoa! I asked about something like this 2 years ago but never got to making anything [1]! Super exciting something like this exists!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37885584

12 hours agoby syntaxing

It would be nice if the extension wrote them to some shared repository. That way, the videos could be preserved for humanity without Google having a say in it.

Added benefit: every video would have to be archived only once.

12 hours agoby amelius

Now add DHT so clients can download videos from each other as a torrent and you solved global video distribution.

14 hours agoby WithinReason

https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

10 hours agoby untech

I've had this idea myself so cool to see it implemented.

What I'd really like is a kind of universal web caching backend. So everything I access goes through a cache and I have the option of viewing from cache if something goes offline or changes. I could also mark things as "favourite" so they don't ever expire from the cache. Does such a thing exist?

10 hours agoby globular-toast

My archiving app called HEAP can be configured using a simple apple script and yt-dlp to do this too. And since it's a native macOS app instead of a browser extension, it works via all browsers:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/heap-website-full-page-image/i...

10 hours agoby busymom0

~/os/starchive (main)[56daf7] $ ls -lh data

total 3207312

-rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 525M Aug 2 09:11 2PMzaym-StM.mov

-rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 362M Aug 2 09:10 CHbawkGc_os.mov

-rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 658M Aug 2 09:11 lqR7VV8ftys.mov

~/os/starchive (main)[56daf7] $ ./starachive

Server starting on port 3009...

JSON received: map[videoId:CHbawkGc_os]

Added video CHbawkGc_os to queue. Queue length: 1

Processing video CHbawkGc_os. Remaining in queue: 0

15 hours agoby fcpguru