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Comment by WORLD_ENDS_SOON | Hacker News Reader

To add another item to the list of legal, legitimate uses of YouTube-dl: lots of public domain content is uploaded to YouTube, including a lot of media produced by the US government. For example, The White House has a YouTube channel, and my understanding of US law is that the vast majority of the content uploaded to that channel is public domain (produced by federal employees in the course of their job). Journalists or anyone else wanting to monitor the government would likely find YouTube-dl useful for archiving this public domain content from government channels.

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I've gobbled hours of Cspan videos with youtube-dl. Turns out cspan is a hodgepodge of like 3-5 video hosting and codec schemes, but it is able to pull about a 3rd of them no problem.

Definitely forking it, I need this to continue my research.

Hope you can find a way to fork it. GitHub has disabled the repo and many forked repos.

The beauty of `git clone` is that there are copies of the repository on many thousands of hard drives (including mine -- last pulled a few days back). The main loss at this point is the metadata stored in GitHub's proprietary addons, like issues.

We can hope this inspires a) greater suspicion toward proprietary players that are sitting atop open-source work like GitHub (they're not the only one by any stretch); and b) greater adoption of systems that distribute the software's entire history together, including documentation and bug reports, e.g. Fossil.

I'm the Founder of BackHub and that's one of the reasons why we offer backups for GitHub repositories, incl. the metadata! Reach out for a discount.

If no-one else has anything more recent, would you be ok to put yours online somewhere for others to grab?

Turns out it's not needed. There are up-to-date ones already around.

eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953

And there is GitCenter, which is git over zeronet (a p2p network similar to BitTorrent but for dynamic content)

The code still in pypi, you can still get it from there

https://pypi.org/project/youtube-dlc/#files

Is there alternative to github? Feels like there should be. One that isn't regulated, a wild west for lost code so to speak

Try GitLab.

Or Gitea!

Do either store issues as objects in the repo itself?

Not git, but I believe fossil[1] does this.

[1]: https://www.fossil-scm.org/

Do you know of any systems that do this? Seems like a good idea.

I really like https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket for this.

Google should add direct download links for public domain content, but that's another fight entirely.

Why should they ? YouTube is in the streaming business, not the archival business. If someone wants to make their videos available for download they should post a link on their website, served through their servers and bandwidth.

Youtube benefits from being everyone's go-to site for finding video content. Keeping that monopoly of mindshare is worth far more to them than any short sighted profit maximisation.

as recent legal action shows companies benefit from being monopolies up until the point that they monopolize too much.

Yeah that's not some kind of general rule. This is because the US legal system in particular lets this happen. And in fact, the US legal system works so badly that it often still benefits companies long after they've monopolized too much, causing all sorts of damage to consumers and other companies that actually did nothing wrong.

Presumably as a condition of being allowed to hold their monopoly status and treat the (publicly developed) internet as a source of annuities.

Isn't streaming live video? It seems to me that youtube is exactly in archival video and hardly in streaming. But it's a big site so maybe a lot of people use it in ways I don't know.

Streaming is not exclusively live video. Streaming is viewing the file as it downloads. As a stream. The alternative is what we did in the dark ages. Download the entire file before beginning playback.

Even in the dark ages (e.g. '97) we could watch the fragment of the avi videos as they downloaded.

‘97 is classic antiquity. The dark ages came later, after civilization fell. We obtained WMVs from Kazaa because that’s all that was left.

I myself preferred realplayer ("buffering...") and its more advanced cousin realplayer G2.

From what I remember WMVs were mostly fake so I would never download them

WMVs can embed instructions on where to grab codecs or authorization to play the content in the multimedia. Back in the day if you played WMV with windows media player this could be used to pwn your computer.

damn. then I've been living through those ages. I feel old.

Because it is the right thing to do.

Actually, you can host any amount of pirated video content on youtube, as long as its "visibility" set to "private"...

I'd love to be wrong here, but there are two separe things, content license and general YouTube terms of use, I think the terms prevent you from downloading any content, the fact that some content is licensed CC has to do more with being explicit, perhaps for displaying publicly or just informative, and I want to think they are leaving a bit of gray area for non abusive use(tons of downloads) , but you can see there is no download button, and if you build something that depends on it to certain scale they could go after you with terms of use, not license.

If you can prove me wrong with some link to where are we covered legally to download CC content from YouTube, it would make me very happy.

> I think the terms prevent you from downloading any content, the fact that some content is licensed CC has

Maybe you are right. If that is the case it is questionable whether contents produced with tax payers' money should exclusively hosted on Youtube to increase Google's income and restrict tax payers' rights.

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