1 yr. ago • 96%

I just downloaded the entire Classic Chicago Television youtube channel on a whim

a TorrentFreak article got me spooked so I fired up the ol' yt-dlp. Got the entire channel, including comments, description metadata, and thumbnail images.

A significant number of videos were actually unavailable because of an odd YouTube bug where 15+ year old videos were listed as "currently being processed". I may re-run this later (since I ran it in archive file mode) to get the missing videos, as it seems there may be about 300 out of 4911 videos missing.

30 comments

Nice! What're you gonna do with them? Are you gonna upload them somewhere, or just hold onto them?

16
- They still happily exist on YouTube- for now. So no point in re-hosting, they'll get squirreled away into the Giant Hard Drive of Doom.
  
  If something happens to the actual archive project in the near future, I'll likely section them up into 20gb pieces and post them out on a torrent someplace.
  
  16
  
  Just upload it to archive.org before your backup dies. No need to hoard it for yourself.
  
  6
Gives an idea of the amount of data YouTube is storing, if only this one channel is 250GB!

15
- And that 250GB is probably just the downloaded and HEVC-compressed files. YouTube actually promotes uploading in raw formats for best quality, just 3-4 full-length movies would be enough to fill 250GB for them
  
  5
- And mind you, they have a high number of videos but most are short clips and all of them are low res, 360p or 480p max. Any other channel uploading HD or 4k content will be orders of magnitudes larger for fewer videos.
  
  4
- makes me wonder how the whole thing is sustainable for them, on average it seems about 6gb per 100 videos
  
  2
  
  at 1080p
  
  2
- iirc youtube is right now a net loss for google, hence them constantly trying to stuff it with ads, youtube premium, etc.
  
  1
Plan to do this with a lot of the entertainment videos I watch, considering how ban happy some websites have been with content creators, being able to still see their craft after it is gone is worthwhile.

Just need to buy a fuckton of storage though

13
- Me too. There's a couple channels I've downloaded in their entirety, but they're nothing like the size of this one.
  
  2
Nice

7
Nice!

Could you fell us what tool you used to also get the description text and the comments? With dlp i only found the option of downloading the video itself.

5
- yt-dlp does support fetching comments and description text - if you use the --write-info-json and --write-comments options, it will save them as a JSON file alongside other video metadata.
  
  8
  
  Yep. Those two and --write-thumbnail
  
  1
  
  Niiice! Didn't know that this was supported so far.
  
  Thank you mate!
  
  1
Let me know when the torrent is up.

4
- I have room to help seed. Commenting to check back later.
  
  2
Probably a silly question but where did you even find that?

2
- Find what? The channel, or the tool?
  
  2
  
  Ah found in GitHub. For some reason I never put 2 and 2 together to automate YouTube video downloads. What a noob hah.
  
  2
  
  Bit of both, the tool would be good to know mainly
  
  1
What are they for?

1
- What are what for? The downloaded videos?
  
  I just didn't want this cool piece of history to dissappear from the public eye because of corporate retards. probably won't ever watch more than 1% of them.
  
  7
Is this the procedure you used?

https://superuser.com/questions/1752396/how-to-download-all-videos-with-yt-dlp-from-a-youtube-channel-after-the-redesign

1
- Pretty much. You can either point it at the channel OR use a link to their Videos playlist (the playlist you get when hitting "play all"). I usually use the playlist to be consistent.
  
  1

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