Hacker News

points by chmod775 2 days ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] glouwbug 2 days ago

I've had luck going to my liked videos, hitting the 3 dots under "Liked videos", selecting "Show unavailable videos", and copying the video watch?= ID into google. If the video is popular enough its text should pop up in a forum somewhere with some discussion at least where you'll find the right clues. Example: 9_1Qn370IIY

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

Just FYI: only your last 5000 liked videos are in this list, then they drop off the beginning. So back up the list itself if you depend on it

[–] glouwbug 2 days ago

Strange how they only let you store that many. That's gotta less than a couple megs

[–] code_biologist 2 days ago

I assume it’s a Bigtable thing. I hate Bigtable so much.

[–] oblio 2 days ago

That seems ironic. Does <<Big>>Table have limited table sizes?

[–] cowlevel 9 hours ago

A couple megs times one billion users is a couple pets.

[–] wodenokoto 2 days ago

Interesting. Is there a similar reason why old videos show up as unwatched?

I often get a wave of videos I've watched years ago pop up as recommended and not marked as watched.

[–] joshuat 2 days ago

internet archive also has a decent portion of old popular videos

[–] jamesfinlayson 2 days ago

Internet Archive is one of the few tech causes that I donate to for this reason.

[–] JKCalhoun 2 days ago

Scrape, my friend.

I saw a similar thing some years back: playlists I had created began to be missing videos.

Been scraping ever since…

[–] numpad0 2 days ago

The problem is that people don't have 100TB of spare storage to hoard everything they want local. It's obvious that you should be hoarding them all.

[–] RiverCrochet 2 days ago

I don't download YouTube videos, but my grandmother's cousin does. I'm trying to get her to stop. Anyway, she has a strategy of downloading the 720p version of videos if the content is something that doesn't merit the full 4K resolution. Typical cases would be commentary consisting of mostly someone talking, comedy, or old TV shows.

[–] tmtvl 2 days ago

> I'm trying to get her to stop.

...what? Why? Do you feel the videos she likes should be allowed to just vanish into the mists of time? To me that sounds like saying 'my sister takes pictures at her daughters' birthdays and I'm trying to get her to stop'.

[–] matheusmoreira 2 days ago

Data hoarding is a deep rabbit hole that can consume a lot of time, money and effort. Used to hoard rare stuff but had to stop for my own good.

[–] Dylan16807 2 days ago

If you're grabbing lots of things because they meet some definition of rare, yeah.

If you're grabbing 720p of things you actually watched, then at 4 hours at day and 1.5Mbps an entire year of recordings would be less than a terabyte. So I'd estimate this as a $1-5 per month hobby and the time/effort shouldn't be too bad either. If they reach small NAS territory then that's a useful thing to learn. They just need to limit the 4K content.

[–] ndsipa_pomu 2 days ago

However, it's satisfying to be able to smugly watch/listen to content that becomes unavailable due to it being old or unpopular or even complicated by rights issues.

Just yesterday, I was watching Digging The Greats on YouTube, discussing De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising. He can't even recreate the beat/mix on YouTube as it would get flagged for copyright. It was unavailable for streaming/download until 2023 due to licensing issues.

My go-to example of disappearing media is the third season of Monkey Dust that ran into problems with music licensing and so it was never available on DVD and will never be screened again. (Available through nautical methods)

[–] account42 2 days ago

Yeah, just like collecting stamps or other similar hobbies. So what?

[–] 10111001 2 days ago

>> I'm trying to get her to stop.

> ...what? Why? Do you feel the videos she likes should be allowed to just vanish into the mists of time? To me that sounds like saying 'my sister takes pictures at her daughters' birthdays and I'm trying to get her to stop'.

Anything, even good things, can be done to excess.

[–] xattt 2 days ago

r/datahoarders would like to have a word with you.

[–] kulahan 2 days ago

Just to be clear, they've named the subreddit after a mental disorder, which I think sorta proves his point :P

[–] CamperBob2 2 days ago

"My grandmother's cousin" is probably the new "SWIM."

[–] kulahan 2 days ago

I didn't used to think this was so obvious, but I'm so annoyed with the absolute frequency of ads on chromecast that I'm about to try and force my chromecast to look at some local jellyfin server or whatever and just pre-download every video I want to watch.

That being said, up until literally a week or two ago, I had a data cap of 1.3TB/mo. It'd take me a while to hoard much data after all of my normal data usage. If you stream a lot of video, 1.3TB is shockingly little.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

They're not that big especially if you download in a low quality level.

[–] matheusmoreira 2 days ago

Can't do that. Archives demand the highest quality source material. Lossy processes cannot be reversed.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

It's better to have a lossy copy than no copy.

What are you trying to archive? Is it the words the person is saying, or the arrangement of his freckles? Even the lowest video quality is sufficient to convey all of the information content of most videos. Sometimes the audio alone is sufficient.

The file size difference between the 360p and 4k versions of the video can be 95% or more. That is to say you can archive twenty times more videos. I wouldn't recommend going below 360p. At 360p expect to store around 1-2 MB per minute.

[–] tyrabound 2 days ago

It begs the question and depends on the purpose whether you actually need the whole video. I believe most YouTube videos have a short expiration date.

[–] nomilk 2 days ago

Same experience. I have years of notes and many link to specific youtube video sources (with time stamp). Unfortunately those URLs don't even give a title of a video, so tracking down removed videos can be hard. However, I've had some luck using LLMs! (obviously only when I can remember the context of a quote or some details about the video, even if vague). Once you know the video title it can often be found on unofficial youtube mirror sites.

[–] paulpauper 2 days ago

YouTube has among the worst linkrot. Stuff gets deleted , hidden, or channels deleted for even the tiniest of supposed violations or reasons.

Same for downloading content. Over 15+ years, there have been so many tools that purport to download YouTube videos and they either don't work or get patched or full of bugs or malware. It's surprisingly hard to do, especially at any scale. more of an art than science. understandably, YouTube does not want people just downloading their content easily without paying for premium.

[–] jamesfinlayson 2 days ago

yt-dlp has worked well for me, though it stops working periodically (or probably more likely Youtube makes a change to break it).

[–] gulabjamuns 2 days ago

You need to update yt-dlp frequently.

yt-dlp -U

[–] wasmitnetzen 2 days ago

YouTube Premium "downloading" isn't really a download either, the app needs internet access about once a week to refresh the download.

[–] greatgib 2 days ago

That is the worse with Youtube, not that you don't have access to the video anymore but that you don't even have the title anymore so if you don't have a good memory, you have no clue of what piece of knowledge you lost from your library.

[–] cubefox 2 days ago

Yeah. If the video was sufficiently popular, you can do a Google search for the video ID, and some websites with the link will hopefully have additional information like the title. This is unlikely to work for more obscure videos though.

[–] account42 2 days ago

> your library

That's the thing though, it was never yours. Just a corner in Google's library that they let you curate. You don't have to do that. It was never a good deal.

[–] pishpash 2 days ago

Yeah but how often do you really go back to look. The only time is when I want to show someone else something, never for myself. It also means I already have a memory of it and that's good enough.

[–] greatgib 2 days ago

in my case, it is for example play list of music videos. Sometimes I hear a very nice unknown music as series soundtrack, sometimes you manage to find the name of long forgotten loved song. And usually, in the rush of the daily activity, it is simple to "save to playlist" while watching it in youtube.

Then, usually you play the list by itself from random position and order. So I quite often listen to them, but for a playlist of maybe 50 entries, i will just noticed that things disappeared when looking at the "hidden entries" thing.

[–] _annum 2 days ago

but now one else can make memories of it :(

[–] AAThrash 2 days ago

We need to make peer to peer popular again.

[–] busssard 2 days ago

peertube

[–] matheusmoreira 2 days ago

All those moments will be lost to time...

Like tears in the rain.

[–] ww520 2 days ago

Seize the moment while it lasts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU

In this day and age will AI be born a replicant but dies a human?

[–] partomniscient 2 days ago

Just like attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, and C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate...

[–] dopa42365 2 days ago

A ton of youtubers (the ones doing it for a living, content creators, whatever you call them) hide or delete old videos that didn't age well for a variety of reasons (too much shilling, bad jokes, false speculation, more or less accidental misinformation). In addition to removed content if the account was deleted or banned.

[–] maybewhenthesun 2 days ago

There used to be tons of videos from around 2008-2010 of a french folk festival I always went to. I remember watching all videos of those events and see if I spotted anyone I knew.

Those were definitely not copyright claimed by anybody. But 3/4 of them are gone by now when I tried some nostalgia - youtbe -spelunking recently . I assume youtube silently deletes videos if they are never watched? Or maybe they are still there, but not easily findable anymore.

[–] kombookcha 2 days ago

I suspect that they might still exist if you go through the uploader's profile, but are buried in a way that makes them not really searchable. This seems to be the case for goofy meme videos made by friends of mine in the 00s.

Still - it would not surprise me to find out that youtube has some kind of culling mechanism for deleting old videos form inactive uploaders that don't get views.

[–] jobigoud 2 days ago

I was going to suggest searching on DailyMotion as it was the Made-in-France Youtube concurrent and was quite popular in these years but apparently they've gone full tiktok and removed old videos… sigh.

[–] Razengan 2 days ago

That's one of the biggest problems on these silo'ed platforms

Also afraid of this happening on Apple Music, Books etc

I wish they at least stored the title of the video

[–] sergiotapia 2 days ago

>There's videos from ~15 years ago that I consider gone for good

This is literally why I built joyscroller for myself hahaha give a try, fork it if you want. https://github.com/sergiotapia/joyscroller

[–] lofaszvanitt 2 days ago

you can use ytdlp, to save the playlist only, so you can search the missing ones based on their ID using a search engine

[–] mihaaly 2 days ago

Tidal playlist are so as well. Maddening. Ruins the joy of listening, among several other things. I am quitting this stream on demand crap.

[–] baby 2 days ago

laddergoat still up there though

[–] DarkNova6 2 days ago

Any luck with the wayback machine?