#youtubearchive has a bot that provides some control over a YouTube archiving setup. Videos are downloaded with a patched yt-dlp and saved to cloud storage.
In 2018, deleted videos were uploaded to IA into now-deindexed youtube_CHANNELID items. Uploads were suspended later in 2018 for a big software rewrite. In 2022, IA informed us that it no longer wants the deleted YouTube videos collected by this project.
We do not yet have a nice way to browse the archived videos, but they can be manually retrieved.
This is an active channel, but we may sometimes take 1-2 days to respond. If you are here to get access to some video, you’ll want to keep your IRC client connected for a while. You may want to set up a bouncer like ZNC or The Lounge.
If you have rack space, bandwidth, servers, or hard drives available for storing deleted videos, please let us know in the channel. This is somewhat urgent as the cloud storage may go away at an unknown time.
Please donate if you would like to help cover my costs: https://ko-fi.com/ivan_ (ivan followed by one underscore)
You do not necessarily need access to the IRC bot. If you have a good list of channels to archive, please link to the list in the IRC channel. If something is urgent, ping ivan, benjins, JAA, or other active users with voice or ops.
!help shows help!password PMs you the username and password for accessing the dashboard, logs, and stats (not archived data, sorry)!status shows how many tasks and task-starting scripts are running!a <channel, user, playlist, or /watch?v= URL> [rationale] start a task to grab videos not yet grabbed
!s or run again to make sure everything was grabbed!s <channel, user, playlist, /watch?v= URL, or folder> shows how many videos are saved in the main folder for the corresponding channel or playlist; for /watch?v= URLs, the number of captures saved for the video
!sa <channel, user, playlist, or /watch?v= URL> equivalent to !s followed by !a!abort TASK_NAME aborts a task
-> TASK_NAME message, not a URL.!delist FOLDER removes a folder from the lists used by the task-starting scriptsIf a video is already saved, it will be not be downloaded again. If something needs to be saved again manually, please request this in the channel.
Livestream videos that are currently streaming are always skipped.
A task may crash without notice after e.g. database downtime. Just !a again if this happens.
If a channel has just released a video, please wait until a high-resolution format is available.
We have enough channels of people playing popular games.
Please don’t archive channels with tons of autogenerated content, or channels with pirated movies (unless very high view counts). You will be banned for archiving Webdriver Torso.
We can only get about 1% of everything uploaded to YouTube. The goal is not to “save YouTube” but to maximize the value of the subset that we can collect.
If the majority of a channel is not worth archiving, please use a Copy Links extension and archive just the popular or otherwise desirable videos. These can be submitted to #youtubearchive-spam to avoid flooding the main channel.
Please archive:
?gl= to avoid having to switch location e.g. https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending?gl=MX https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending?gl=JPA1B=GoogleTranslate($A$1, "en", $B1) into C1; drag C1 corner handle down to fill.