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Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by chmod775 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:43AM (#50380526)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by glouwbug on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:54AM (#50380710)
[delayed]
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by joshuat on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:51AM (#50381395)
internet archive also has a decent portion of old popular videos
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by jamesfinlayson on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:06PM (#50388040)
Internet Archive is one of the few tech causes that I donate to for this reason.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by cowlevel on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:54PM (#50387575)
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
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by glouwbug on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:11PM (#50387701)
[delayed]
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by code_biologist on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:32PM (#50387827)
I assume it’s a Bigtable thing. I hate Bigtable so much.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by oblio on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:17PM (#50388120)
That seems ironic. Does <<Big>>Table have limited table sizes?
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by cowlevel on Sunday November 08, 2026 @01:28AM (#50410916)
A couple megs times one billion users is a couple pets.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by wodenokoto on Friday November 06, 2026 @03:58AM (#50389862)
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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by nomilk on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:01AM (#50380800)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by DarkNova6 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @12:05PM (#50381557)
Any luck with the wayback machine?
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by JKCalhoun on Thursday November 05, 2026 @12:20PM (#50381717)
Scrape, my friend.

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

Been scraping ever since…

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by numpad0 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @01:55PM (#50382907)
[delayed]
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by RiverCrochet on Thursday November 05, 2026 @02:40PM (#50383449)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by tmtvl on Thursday November 05, 2026 @03:36PM (#50384147)
> 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'.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by 10111001 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:25PM (#50384655)
>> 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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by xattt on Thursday November 05, 2026 @04:34PM (#50384765)
[delayed]
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by kulahan on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:25PM (#50386550)
Just to be clear, they've named the subreddit after a mental disorder, which I think sorta proves his point :P
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by LoganDark on Thursday November 05, 2026 @08:00PM (#50386837)
Maybe hoarding is the name of a mental disorder, but it's also like, a verb.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by ndsipa_pomu on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:35AM (#50390640)
In defence of data-hoarding, it's relatively benign apart from maybe costing time and money, but then so do a lot of hobbies. Hoarding seems to be celebrated when it's billionaires hoarding wealth, even though the billionaires typically use their wealth in the most harmful and damaging way possible.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by JKCalhoun on Friday November 06, 2026 @09:04AM (#50392427)
To be sure, I am probably more like a casual data hoarder—only hoarding files I will revisit (I have a TV app I wrote that plays these videos on a schedule—a lot like these "HN TV" sites we've been seeing vibe-coded lately).

But it does take a non-zero amount of time to copy/paste a URL and then move the files to external storage when my laptop gets heavy with data.

And while it does feel a bit like a mental sickness (really, sickness?) I have other behaviors like spending too much time on YouTube in general that unfortunately would persist whether I was hoarding or not.

I do try to walk away from the browser more these days—limit it to a few hours in the morning and then when I am eating lunch or whatever during the day.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by ndsipa_pomu on Friday November 06, 2026 @09:40AM (#50392862)
I don't think that really counts as hoarding.

Hoarding is more getting hold of data/films/tv/music that you're not expecting to get around to watching, but feel like you want a copy or that it is of cultural relevance.

e.g. I grabbed a copy of Sátántangó due to it's fame/importance, but I'm unlikely to sit through 7 hours of it.

Or more recently, I grabbed a better quality copy of the original Green Hornet series that I'm not going to bother watching.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by CamperBob2 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @06:43PM (#50386200)
"My grandmother's cousin" is probably the new "SWIM."
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by matheusmoreira on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:19PM (#50387758)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by Dylan16807 on Friday November 06, 2026 @01:38AM (#50388955)
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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by ndsipa_pomu on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:31AM (#50390612)
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)

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by account42 on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:57AM (#50391304)
Yeah, just like collecting stamps or other similar hobbies. So what?
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by kulahan on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:24PM (#50386540)
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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by cowlevel on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:54PM (#50387580)
They're not that big especially if you download in a low quality level.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by matheusmoreira on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:17PM (#50387747)
Can't do that. Archives demand the highest quality source material. Lossy processes cannot be reversed.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by cowlevel on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:38PM (#50387858)
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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by tyrabound on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:41AM (#50391659)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by paulpauper on Thursday November 05, 2026 @01:14PM (#50382345)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by jamesfinlayson on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:18PM (#50388127)
yt-dlp has worked well for me, though it stops working periodically (or probably more likely Youtube makes a change to break it).
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by gulabjamuns on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:17AM (#50390953)
You need to update yt-dlp frequently.

yt-dlp -U

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by wasmitnetzen on Friday November 06, 2026 @03:47AM (#50389771)
YouTube Premium "downloading" isn't really a download either, the app needs internet access about once a week to refresh the download.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by mihaaly on Thursday November 05, 2026 @03:10PM (#50383833)
Tidal playlist are so as well. Maddening. Ruins the joy of listening, among several other things. I am quitting this stream on demand crap.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by greatgib on Thursday November 05, 2026 @06:37PM (#50386152)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by pishpash on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:09PM (#50386418)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by _annum on Friday November 06, 2026 @01:52AM (#50389036)
but now one else can make memories of it :(
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by greatgib on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:02AM (#50391357)
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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by cubefox on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:36AM (#50390652)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by account42 on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:03AM (#50391374)
> 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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by dopa42365 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @07:32PM (#50386610)
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.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by Razengan on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:07PM (#50387259)
That's one of the biggest problems on these silo'ed platforms

I wish they at least stored the title of the video

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by AAThrash on Thursday November 05, 2026 @09:26PM (#50387374)
We need to make peer to peer popular again.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by busssard on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:47AM (#50391707)
peertube
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by matheusmoreira on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:15PM (#50387730)
All those moments will be lost to time...

Like tears in the rain.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by ww520 on Friday November 06, 2026 @12:47AM (#50388657)
Seize the moment while it lasts.

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

Will AI be born a replicant but dies a human?

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by partomniscient on Friday November 06, 2026 @06:16AM (#50390949)
Just like attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, and C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate...
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by sergiotapia on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:16PM (#50388114)
>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

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by baby on Thursday November 05, 2026 @11:47PM (#50388346)
laddergoat still up there though
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by lofaszvanitt on Friday November 06, 2026 @02:39AM (#50389329)
you can use ytdlp, to save the playlist only, so you can search the missing ones based on their ID using a search engine
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by maybewhenthesun on Friday November 06, 2026 @02:57AM (#50389433)
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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by kombookcha on Friday November 06, 2026 @03:07AM (#50389490)
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.

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by jobigoud on Friday November 06, 2026 @07:29AM (#50391573)
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.