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Comment by bdz | Hacker News Reader

I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site.

I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.

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You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.

I compulsively take pictures of the sky, same never to be looked at

Taking pictures is important to getting better. Be glad that each one doesn't cost $.30 in film like it would have in 1980 - not inflation adjusted (prices from memory so perhaps off a bit). That is just the cost of the film you used, if you want to look at the negative you have development costs, and even more costs to get a print. Today you don't have to worry about costs of a photo and so can take a lot of them without worry will it be good, if it is bad just learn from the mistake and throw it away.

BLS says $0.30 is $1.25 today. Each roll was like 30 pictures too (24, but I like round numbers), so like her $30 a roll?

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=.30&year1=1980...

I'm going from memory, but I recall that both 25 and 36 picture rolls were common and there were some 12 picture rolls. (maybe 15?) And of course there were a number of different sizes - 110, 120, 35mm, disc, each with different sizes and costs. (more film sizes at the professional level as well, but your local drug store had all of the above)

We can’t ever document all of life on earth but we can try

I take pictures of the sky, not to post it somewhere immediately but it’s like documentary captures for later years looking back

I'm an amateur photographer. Lately, I've taken to making curated collections from my "slush feeds". Meaning, going through a particular trip, time period, moment and grabbing the best photos, and parceling them out to a dedicated album. Makes for a much better experience and fun to share with friends/family.

I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go further back to check on how living things were around me, and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see how I lived life back then.

The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So many memories.

I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.

I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that comparison stuck with me.

As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough. Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.

Often when I am bored I pick a random day in the past and look at where I was on that day and which pictures I took. Refreshing memories is a great idea but the low tech way is enough for me.

Might sound stupid, but: differences between Google memories vs. Snapchat memories?

Also my issue is that I would NEVER upload the photos I have on my hard drive due to privacy issues, but if I had a local model that could categorize photos and whatnot, that would be cool. I have over 10k screenshots / images. Many of them have text on it, so probably need OCR.

> You are a digital hoarder.

Is this meant to be negative? Many videos I have watched on YouTube are now unavailable. I wish I had saved them, too, i.e. I wish I was a digital hoarder, too, but eh, no space for me.

> Is this meant to be negative?

It didn't sound negative to me. I immediately associated it with people who obsessively recorded TV on VHS and their collections are now treasure troves of historic media not available from any other source. You do you.

Yeah, I still have a VHS collection of cartoons I used to watch as a kid.

It did not sound particularly negative to me either, but if it was, I wonder why.

Have you heard of https://github.com/immich-app/immich ?

I have an e-ink photo frame on the wall that switches picture once every 24h, picking one of my pictures of the last 10+ years by random. So every single one of my tens of thousands of pictures gets a real chance to be seen at least once during my lifetime :)

Which frame do you use? I’ve been looking for this for a long time, but I wasn’t aware color e-ink was good enough for this yet.

it's actually black and white, and needed some programming to work like this.

> do we ever?

We have AI to sort them so it will payoff, or already does.

I started after channels started removing their own videos because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good stuff just gone.

Some of the old YTPs were fantastic. They don't exist now.

Generations of talent & creativity just gone.

What's a "YTP"?

YouTube poop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Poop

I recommend starting with Mom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7opxguZWns

Or because someone else made them take them off. Or because they were deemed 'too dangerous'. Or worse.

Cody's lab removed a few of them and many others.

There was one instance where a prominent "doujin" musical artist got fingered as a thief. Away went all of their videos, except... he'd packaged them as something completely different from wherever he'd taken them from. One song in particular sucked to lose, because its sibling still exists as an "extended" upload. So, I can listen to the one any time, but the other, I simply know that it once existed, and that it might still exist somewhere else, just under a different title. I can't even remember how it went.

Anything you see on the Internet can be gone in a moment. If something is important to you, you must save it to guarantee you want to see it again.

The problem then becomes organizing and resurfacing content, especially when it'll likely be outside the context you originally found it.

Wasn't expecting to see a fellow sumo hoarder on HN...there's dozens of us, dozens!

I was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years ago. I wish I'd archived them.

Archive.org has it at least, everything from 2009 until 2023. But that's also need to be mirrored because can be taken down https://archive.org/download/jasons-all-sumo-channel-archive...

Do you ever go back and actually watch those videos? Whenever I start to journal, track, or just document something, after some time I notice again and again that most of the value has already been created the moment I finish working on a specific entry. Even with something seemingly very important like medical records. Maybe one exception I can think of are recordings of memories involving people close to you

I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.

Whether something is worth downloading is a good heuristic for whether it's worth watching in the first place. e.g. university lectures, technical talks, hobby technique tutorials, etc. are something you may want to reference in the future, or you may want to save for your kids in case they're interested in it one day, etc. The latest slop from professional "content creators" that you can't imagine keeping so you can pass it down one day? Not worth your time today either.

I have the same with journals, but the video archiving has actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I think the difference is that you control the journal (and so rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos you're archiving are by default outside of your control and can be more easily lost.

I actually do! I have a perpetual VLC playlist which plays those videos randomly if I need some background noise.

I also have a ton of music videos from Youtube. Many of them are fan-made, many already unavailable I sometimes play them on a projector when I'm throwing a party.

How many of the 20,000+ videos you've saved locally do you actually care about if they get "removed" from YouTube?

I'm not sure and that's a good question but after a point it was a principle of saving them rather than caring them about. Probably a digital hoarding attitude.

You never know until you need to find something and can’t find it.

I don’t think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old hand written journals, just the physical process of writing has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There’s also a bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the same at all

With more content than we need being produced regularly, do you really need to store everything you've ever watched?

I used to be an MP3 and movie hoarder, then somehow I realized it was not worth my time.

Now I only hoard my photos and I keep them all on my phone (slash cloud) for me to actually scroll through regularly.

Same here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to keep forever.

I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me.

Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it.

So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more.

And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...

> And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...

Isn’t that the YouTube Music app?

No.

How so? What’s missing?

* Several hundred million tracks that are not labeled as "music" by uploaders, to start.

* Native integration with my phone music player, allowing for things like seamless playback, etc.

* Things I like on YouTube automatically go to my device.

* If a track is removed from YouTube, it stays on my device.

(Did you take 10 seconds to read my comment above?)

* Every Youtube video is playable on the Youtube music app.

* There is a liked videos playlist

Yes, I read your comment above.

Regarding the other two points, it is of course understandable why you'd want to download and have your own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a feature.

Great. I'll keep using mine, though.

I have a script that calls out to a small llm

  artist = llm_call("return the name of the artist based on this title", title)

etc. with some stripping of newlines etc. It works well! they can often infer the correct answer even if it's not present in the title

Hey ^^, that's a great idea.

I wrote all of this stuff pre-LLMs, never occurred to me until now, thanks!

I doubt that it’s a nobody else situation, and it’s more of a management doesn’t want it as it takes away the need for their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn’t want it, as there’s no more royalties coming in. Can’t release an app that pisses of the industry.

Can you upload some most interesting deleted YT videos to Web Archive or even Dailymotion, so that they are preserved for the next generation?

What is your storage setup, do you have lots of hard drives, or does this go online somewhere?

how do you manage the archive? I mean the file hierarchy structures etc. i started archiving youtube videos recently, now saving descriptions and other metadatas too, but simply having them all in one directory doesn't seem to be a good idea.

do you have a cron job or something? i know it is probably trivial but eh

No! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly

Popular self-hosted solution: https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

You people always make everything more complicated than necessary.

  yt-dlp -o '%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s' --cookies-from-browser chrome https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=LL

That does none of the things tubearchivist does, among them:

- Subscribe to your favorite YouTube channels - Index and make videos searchable - Play videos - Keep track of viewed and unviewed videos

Not to mention having to ssh and copy paste URLs around, instead of visiting a page in my browser.

> Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface.

If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is popular.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Someone should put together and publish a docker container that does that.

Yep. But.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I sent the video to my friend, but his phone says "/home/trvz/media/youtube/george hotz archive/20251109 - comma ai ｜ COMMA CON 2025 ｜ George Hotz ｜ Outwit, Outplay, Outlast ｜ President [werrvv0MVXQ].webm" was not found. Plz help!

I'm also not a fun of such overengineered programs, but using raw yt-dlp alone is not enough for replicating full workflow.

Your command is nice for downloading a single video (I also provide a url from clipboard via xclip), but archiving videos daily from a list of favorite channels would require a bit more scripting. Didn't manage to find anything both minimal and popular to link instead.

It doesn't download just a single video – it downloads all your liked videos with some reasonable sorting.

Put your favorite channels' and playlists' URLs into a text file and use the "-a file.txt" flag to batch download. Use "--dateafter {date of 3 days ago}" to download only the latest videos. Adapt as needed.

Damn, one can really build an offline internet for themselves these days huh?

Gives me Magnum Archives vibes.

Ooooh thanks! ElasticSearch? Who cares, gotta use somehow that spare memory in my k8s home cluster!

What percentage, in numbers?

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