I have hundreds of missing videos in my various lists.

I wish youtube would at least keep the title there so you know what it is that has been lost.

Welcome to the alzheimic future.

That’s a feature. If somebody deletes their video then all of the metadata goes with it. I agree that it can be annoying but among other things, it’s the law.

> it’s the law

Where?

Other sites keep the metadata (and even allow new comments on) deleted posts.

GDPR text asks to delete all data for which the user withdraws consent to share. IANAL but that seems telling.

When a user asks to delete a video it’s deleted, with it goes the title and description.

We've always been at war with Eastasia.

I love me a random 1984 reference… care to explain what’s wrong with honouring user requests to delete their data?

In my opinion, once the video is added to my list, at least the name should become my data.

Also I seriously doubt that all those missing videos were requested to be deleted by the user. I'd be willing to bet that 90% of them were taken down by youtube's ridiculous and mostly broken takedown bots. There should be consequences for frivolous takedowns.

The idea that all or most of these missing videos are due to GDPR deletion requests is completely incorrect. They are almost all from spurious copyright takedown requests. YouTube has no legal obligation to automatically honor these, and it certainly doesn't have to delete all associated metadata. Framing this issue as an instance of YouTube being respectful of their users data is ridiculous.

Yep. If this worked properly and the metadata went out with the video so should the entry. The blank entry is absolutely useless

I had the same problem with a few old videos in my favourites. Google search for the alphanumeric text after "watch?v=" in the URL of the video. In most cases, you will find some information about the video from pages where it might have been embedded.

I despise the memory hole Google dumps things into. As far as YouTube is concerned a deleted video might as well never have existed.

The alternative, that Google doesn't delete stuff that people want deleted, is worse. They can't win either way.

They could delete the video content and leave a sanitized version of the metadata. For instance leave the post date and title while removing the description and owner information.

Searching for a video's URL might let you find some metadata about it. Unfortunately YouTube encourages social media insulation so a video might have only ever been referenced inside of YouTube with no inbound links from the web.

You can easily imagine situations for which the title itself contains information that someone would rather have deleted. Per GDPR and similar regs, if you want that deleted, it has to be.

It's the uploader's video, and they retain ownership of it. If they want it gone, it'll be gone. Since they own the IP, their interests matter more than some random viewer who happened to add it to a playlist some time in the past.

Does youtube-dl support playlists?

Oh yes it does! It is amazing. With the `--download-archive` option you can specify a text file where it stores which videos it already downloaded. So you can periodically make backups of your playlists without unnecessarily downloading videos that you already have.

yeah it will try to download a whole playlist if you give it the URL of the playlist. Last I tried.

I have a script running nightly to backup my playlists

I run a discord server for others downloading youtube content.

We maintain a list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived.

We are currently organizing some efforts to find and download unlisted videos.

Feel free to check us out here: https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf

[1] https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w

How many playlists do you have/create daily?

Just half a dozen. I only backup a set list of playlists (just an array of playlist IDs in bash I periodically change).