Download your favourite YouTube videos

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.

Many from my generation, who grew up during an era of information scarcity, have huge stashes of hoarded data. But what can we do with it? There is no way to legally share it, so we take it with us in our graves.

EDIT: Many good comments, but they all suffer from one blind spot, so I answer here instead of individually.

A lot of content is only legal because it is on YouTube (or any other platform that has deals with the content industry). Sure, we can share illegally in a way that is obscure enough that no one gets sued. But what help is that, eventually it will get either popular and sued out of existence or forgotten and fade.

Then there is old content that is not legally shareable at all, like old game ROMs. Plenty of millennial stuff there but the Gen-X world is already half forgotten.

Cooyright is just too long and too unreliable. What we need at least is exemptions from Copyright for archivists, otherwise a lot of stuff will simply be lost in the coming decades.

> This is the only yt-dlp wrapper that allowed me to properly maintain the Playlist structure to any extent

I have the same requirement and it's possible to do it with the default yt-dlp:

yt-dlp --embed-metadata --parse-metadata "playlist_index:%(track_number)s" "PLAYLIST_URL"

I suppose re-sharing would be the problem - but that may only occur in some instances. And it might not happen immediately either. If it does happen, if there was a way for creators to collect tips, that'd make it more feasible if their videos spread far and wide.

"--sponsorblock-remove all"

has been immensely useful to me as well. The sponsorblock plugin and yt-dlp interop was one of the best things out there ever invented until the marketers fought back and DDOS'd it and made it hard to contribute 'ignore' timestamps for new videos for most users. Still really good for older videos though.

My arguments line for the extension looks something like this:

  /C C:\Users\[user]\youtube-dl\yt-dlp.exe -v -P "D:\Media\Videos" -f "bv*[vcodec!*=av01]+ba/b" --write-subs --embed-subs --sub-langs "en.\*" --compat-options no-keep-subs --merge-output-format mkv [HREF]

This can be mitigated by adding `-o "%(title).150B [%(id)s].%(ext)s" ` to command line, which trims filenames to 150 bytes max. There are other options like --trim-filenames, but yt-dlp don't apply those to the interim part files and that triggers the failure anyway. The relevant issue has been reported on GH years ago and closed by the maintaining author with no PR from me(hey).

i make references to it now and then, and it feels very sad that i didn't archive it.

this specific video was called "Rock to bottom", a half blend between song and joke, with these quotes crammed into it: - "You drink too much Co-Cola, feel like you just can't stop?" - "You check Facebook, even at funeral?" - "You watch more reality television, than actual reality?"

1. Vibed a firefox extension that polls my youtube watch later list and saves as bookmarks

2. Vibed a second firefox extension that syncs bookmarks to a self-hosted karakeep (bookmark manager)

3. Configured karakeep to download videos from youtube bookmarks (it uses yt-dlp internally).

It's pretty nifty.

At some point, all those videos were removed.

I wanted to rewatch some of his videos recently and as far as I can tell most of his videos are now lost media. I should have downloaded them when I had the chance.

All automated for years

Download your favorite tiktok videos, though.

It works really well! And it's all free, open source, and built with Rust to make the footprint as small as possible.

It also has a cool TV mode where you can pick a channel (tiktok/youtube/instagram) and it autoplays stuff at random, even has cool "tandas" videos for in-between to make it feel more authentic. Check it out!

https://github.com/sergiotapia/joyscroller

Websites could ask their visitors to keep a tab open and their browsers will automatically store chunks (and earn safebux for serving videos, if they want to turn that on). This was designed to be far simpler than IPFS, with no “sealing” … just open a browser tab and get paid.

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...

It works now, you can try it locally:

https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud

The real interesting part is when it connects with Safebox remote attestation. Here you can prove that the server has not been compromised, and that together with HTTPS proves that the JS is official. You don’t need men with guns for DRM or copyright… you can enforce it this way. An individual user might hack the JS they got but someone else can’t distribute the hack at scale (unless it is with a rogue jailbroken browser). The Jets in safecloud wouldn’t release the chunks unless there was a recent assertion + TPM attestation from the Safebox serving the player iframe.

This way you can enforce revenue streams like “pay per minute” and have the client side actually enforce it for nearly all users.

@tptacek you would love Safecloud I think

Ideally I want videos on my home server organised into arbitrary folders and a nice simple video player on my Android TV that I can browse the folder tree with. Just like the old days. I don't care about accessing this stuff outside of my home network.

At the time I was already concerned that what would later be called deep fakes would be abused by big sites to mass-manipulate the bifurcated segments of the larger population in near real-time. At that time in 2013 I was told I must be smoking some really good shit, and perhaps I was.

But now in 2026 about twelve years after Google's primitive artificial neural networks showed us an on-silicon view of tripping balls in a grocery store, and now the mediocre enthusiasts both technical and not are no longer like "oh yeah that's cool man" but has been exposed to what artificial neural networks are doing day to day, the concern for targeted convincing-as-totally highly manipulative edits of hour long podcasts is not so "out there".

  https://brand.io/article/spymarks/

  Pouff - Grocery Trip
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgPaCWJL7XI

For this purpose I also kept list, in .yml files, for the most recent URL. Not just on youtube but also dailymotion etc...

Interestingly there are some surges of URLs suddenly being eliminated. Naturally we know the copyright mafia is trying to hinder us, the people here, but it is interesting how that works. Because ... it sometimes works. And then it does not work. Which is quite strange to me.

For instance, you can often still find new videos on youtube here, even full movies. Sometimes you can download them; then suddenly they are gone, but they were up before that for months or even years. So it is really really strange to see some videos suddenly vanishing, others being around for decades literally. Even when you'd assume these have ... "copyright issues".

But yes, everyone should be not deleting the videos they've downloaded.

Agreed. I mourn the deletion of legendary Hair cake video from FilthyFrank every now and then. But at least we have AI slop videos or in better case videos with "The inevitable rise and fall of XXX" title" with human narrator reading AI written script. But hey at least everyone censor word fck and sht.