Hacker News Reader

Comment by DelightOne | Hacker News Reader

It should be automatic.

I don't have enough disk space to archive every video I've every watched.

> I don't have enough disk space to archive every video I've every watched.

You don't need to. It would be enough to allow users to download all videos by default as a sort of local cache, have settings for max cache size and cache policy with LRU by default, and also support pinning.

Heck, doing what Google already does with Google Play updates would already be a step up.

One option is to use cloud storage and to pay for it. If thats not an option, how should an add-on decide what video to archive? A button besides the video, how often you watch it or whether you paste it somewhere else?

You can probably do it just fine for every video you watched twice.

Having also seen cool videos in my YT playlists disappear over time, I've been "caching" the ones more precious to me.

This is a problem that decentralised protocols such as IPFS theoretically solve. You reserve x GB on your storage to cache the content you consume and can optionally "pin" content to keep it on your disk indefinitely.

The problem is there are privacy concerns with this type of system as it's possible for anyone to find out who has consumed particular content.

You probably do.

Let's say you watch new and unique youtube videos for an hour a day, or 365 hours a year. (This is a lot more than I watch, btw)

Let's say we have 5Mbps videos, or half a megabyte per second.

365 * 60 * 60 * 0.5 = 657G/year

A 1TB disk is about $50, for about $25/year to store it at home.

If you upload your videos to S3 Glacier it'll run around $8/year (per year, so after a few years this is more expensive than buying drives).

For comparison, YT premium is $144/year.

I only watch about 10 minutes of unique youtube videos a day on average, so I'm looking at around $1/year cost if I want to archive every single youtube video I've ever seen. It's pretty affordable.

I definitely do not.

> Let's say you watch new and unique youtube videos for an hour a day,

I wonder for how many users this is true. I personally watch several hours a day of youtube because it's mostly on in the background instead of music. Lots of infotainment channels. I'm pretty sure on average it's like 20mins per day can't find the source though.

I like your thinking... but why hide a video on a private S3 bucket?

I was just thinking about this problem from a different angle.

What if everyone, or at least a bunch of willing souls, ran the following script on their on pc's:

1. YouTube-dlc every video you ever watch automatically in the background and save to NEW_VID directory

2. make a checksum of every file that comes into NEW_VID

3. Check by using the checksum if the file already exists on open platforms like https://joinpeertube.org, https://odysee.com or https://d.tube

4. If not, upload the file.

5. Delete the file.

How about the ones you liked?

I was thinking about this a few months ago and wish there was some sort of background app that could keep and eye on my YT accounts likes and archive them.

Here it is - https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist

In a comment[1] on a related thread a few weeks ago, someone pointed out that if you pass youtube-dl a playlist URL instead of an individual video, it will download all the videos on the playlist. Thus, you should be able to just have a cronjob that calls youtube-dl on a specific playlist every so often.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28482923

Can't it be? Like at the router level, maybe?

The router has the issue of traffic and the path being encrypted. It does not see the paths that are browsed and so cannot backup or replace/URL with the new one?

Oh dang, you're right. You'd have to give it the key your browser is using to decrypt the file. Aaaand that's beyond what I can do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com