Cool but ... this also sounds like hording behavior. The number of things I've saved over the years only to throw them away years later and realize that saving them in the first place was a waste of time.
In the 90s my friend's mom would video tape AMC movies. She had 300+ tapes. Maybe she had a few rare ones but now all those movies are available on demand either legally or illegally and in much better quality. Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves. I doubt he ever opened a single magazine since the moment he saved them. Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them.
To be clear, I have a few youtube videos saved on my local storage. I'm just thinking that saving every video I watch reminds me of the things I've personally over-saved.
Actually that reminds me. I met up with the magazine saving friend recently which is when I verified that he finally got rid of his stash. It made me think about things I'm still saving that if I reflect on I know I will never actually look at. For example I have box of about eight 3.5 inch floppy disks from my Amiga days. The odds that I'm going to get an Amiga or download an Amiga emu and get a drive to read those are close enough to zero that I should throw them away. Similarly I have a book of CD-ROMs of backed up data from the 90s. There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.
PSA: if you have a collection or other artifacts for ingest by IA, I’ll cover reasonable shipping costs to get them there. Above a certain size, they’ll handle logistics of packing and shipping for ingest.
> Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves.
I don’t think IA has all early issues of the Microsoft Systems Journal (later MSDN Magazine), among others. So this can be useful. (Also, what kind of person do you think put the magazines up on IA in the first place?..)
I am the exact opposite and sell or throw away pretty much everything that I don't use. I find that doing so not only clutters the house less, but also gives you less to worry about.
My general rule is - if I didn't use it for a year, I don't need it. There are obviously some exceptions like a fire extinguisher (which I hope to never use) and digitized photos, which only go through a careful selection.
I think the thing I kept the longest was a Libranet Linux 3.0 CD set because I worked for Libra Computer Systems for a while and this was the release that I helped building. A few years ago I threw it away, I think after I saw someone uploaded it to archive.org. When I'm 60 and want to install it again for good old time's sake I can.
tl;de: if you don't use something for a year, you probably don't need it.
I don't get around to using plenty of things for the first time a year after I've purchased them. That policy in my life would be a nightmare of constantly rebuying stuff, or failing to rebuy stuff that is now gone forever.
Almost everything that has become indispensable in my life took years to integrate into my life to any significant degree.
I would like to be able to search old videos I’ve seen sometimes. Like to find that one recipe I saw or to pull out that one fact I thought I heard. Or sometimes just to listen to a song that later got made private or deleted outright. When YouTube deletes a video it doesn’t even leave the title in your playlist so it can be frustrating to try and find the same thing again.
> When YouTube deletes a video it doesn’t even leave the title in your playlist
I think this was an insidious decision of YouTube. It's like they want to pretend that videos deleted for ToS violations never existed, because by default the playlist does not even display the "holes" that it now has, either.
It is hoarding behavior. I am sometimes guilty of it but I have no regrets. I have DVD's and CD's that either do exist online in a modified and sometimes censored format or got cancelled for reasons that exist now but did not exist when the movie or song was created social constructs, cancel culture, etc... The original versions probably exist in some obscure place but I am happy with them existing in my collection as well for data parity purposes. The same thing occurs with online videos, podcasts, music and movies.
I prefer to preserve the original artistic works of the producers, directors and screen writers. It could be I am alone in this endeavor and perhaps I am just a hoarder in that regard. I like to watch movies or listen to songs in the way the artists originally intended rather than the current ways that society has determined I should. The exception of course is when a movie is re-mastered and they improve lighting, sound, resolution, etc...
I hesitate to even imagine how AI will sloppify these great works in the future or how they will re-imagine podcasts. The original art will be lost to time and many people will never experience the original results of the blood sweat and tears that went into making them.
> Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them.
Sometimes you're the person who is uploading them to public archives. Because everybody else threw them all away, and you saved them until the technology made archiving practical enough.
I've been replacing all of my physical media for years, but the reason I can do that now is because other people scan/rip and archive/share the stuff. You also have unique stuff that you may not even know is unique. When you find something in your house that you can't find online, scan it and you're paying everybody back for all of the scanning they did for you.
With the CD-ROMs, you should just glide through them one by one and check if you can find the stuff online. If you can, throw them in the trash. If you can't, copy their contents to a folder, and throw them in the trash. Go through the folder over the next hour or next 20 years (however long it takes to get around to it) and take the things you can't find online that you think somebody might want, and get those things to that somebody (uploading to archive.org is always a good place to start.)
edit: I know for a fact that for a lot of people, uploading somewhere on the internet is their standard pre-deletion ritual.
Getting them on a public shared archive is probably a good outcome though. There was that lady who taped hundreds of hours of daytime TV and archiving that has some interesting historical uses?
But a personal copy I'm not sure has much point yeah.
> Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was an American access television producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and archivist, especially known for hoarding and archiving hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years [70,000 VHS tapes], from 1977 until her death in 2012, at which time she had been operating nine properties and three storage units. According to the Los Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving."
>There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.
More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away and discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share.
This is something I think about a lot because I don't have a "digital legacy plan."
> More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away
I think that's not really likely. I'm pretty sure if you poll you'll find that few children care about their parent's "stuff". You can find plenty of people who've lost parents who found that they didn't have any interest in going through their parents stuff and then from that realized their children would be the same to them.
Most children aren't going to dig through anything more than a physical photo album, and when they do, the only pictures that are relevant to them are those with people they know. The rest only have meaning to the dead parent. They aren't going to dig through hard drives or CDs unless they are searching for financial documents so they can finish up their parent's financial affairs.
> discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share
I do worry about that. I just tell myself I'll be dead so it doesn't really matter.
oh that's not why I want them local. I want to open them in final cut pro and edit them and use parts in other videos. I delete the data folder at the end of each day.
I agree with you on a personal level. I also collected a bunch of different things but eventually threw them all away and am now extremely selective about what I keep. I even avoid hoarding digital stuff.
However, in your examples, the fact those things eventually became available in other forms is not necessarily a counterpoint to your acquaintances having kept them. The specific counterpoint being Marion Stokes.
Hording behaviour doesn't really apply digitally. It's not like it's physical magazines or VHS. It's just bytes and bytes are incredibly cheap. It's also easier to move, delete or search. And even if you don't want it, you can upload it to the IA and maybe someone else will use it. Try doing that with your boxes of VHS.
It's only hoarding if you don't fill the collection. It also depends on what percent of your storage you devote to it. If I could store every video I ever watched locally and only pay 1% of my storage cost, why not?
> saving them in the first place was a waste of time
I think of it like this:
Automatically save everything and spend time deleting the things I don't want to keep. vs Manually saving everything.
"Don't want to keep" depends on disk space and cluttering up the list as it grows. Disk space is not really a thing. I use to have a friend who spend many hours every week cleaning up his 512 GB drive. He was quite obviously deleting things he wanted to keep but "had to" make choices. I just have enough drives to keep 1 to 3 copies of everything. (The single drive will also fail inevitably)
The clutter still seems to happen even if I make the effort to get rid of things. Organizing it a bit, say at least by date is inevitable.
Therefore there is nothing to be gained by wasting time saving things. It is more time efficient to waste time by deleting only enormous folders that you clearly don't need to keep around.
Hoarding is only an appropriate term if you don't have the space for it. If you have an empty airplane hangar a few boxes of foo isn't hoarding.
the main feature I want is to just browse youtube like normal in firefox like I always do. And completely forget starchive is running. Then later in the day I'm pleasntly suprised that any video I want to clip is already downloaded and ready. I never know which one I'll want to download and I don't want to have to click any button.
For YouTube videos I feel are worth archiving, I just add them to playlists on my channel, then periodically download my entire channel using a single yt-dlp command (it can keep track of what's already been downloaded).
Yeah I was onboard until the re-encoding part: yt-dlp maintains the exact bits, why on earth would someone want to waste encoding time just to trash the quality?
On top of that... seriously, of all the formats one could choose, MOV?! Might as well choose DivX or RealVideo.
the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't like the youtube video format. But the audio can just be copied. My mac's fan never spins with the hardware acceleration so it runs in the background and I just forget about it.
> the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't like the youtube video format.
That’s not true at all. QuickTime is far from the best video player, but it’s also not entirely worthless. It can play “modern” popular formats like H264 MP4, which is exactly what YouTube recommends.
Why does Apple take the effort to maintain and ship different encoding libraries? I would've expected to both the Safari engine and Quicktime to simply depend on libappleavsmth.dylib?
There's a specific removed video that I want back (the whole channel seems to have been bought by someone who wanted pre edition subscribers or something, then everything on it was nuked and replaced with content that doesn't interest me). I tried emailing the channel's new email address to ask for it, and got no response. Do you know of any practical way to try to get it back?
Speaking of archiving data, is there a search engine that also returns search results from older (no-longer-existent but archived) web pages? The issue I've had with things like the Wayback Machine is that I need to recall the URL or find some other web page still linking to the (now broken) URL.
I creates something similar in concept but with different goal. I wanted to be able to watch videos with sponsor block on iPad ideally using Plex.
I found self hosted solution like this but I was very dissatisfied with how that worked
on other hand I wanted to check out loco.rs framework, so I decided to implement my own solution.
basically you are able to add channels/playlists on many many platforms that yt-dlp supports, you can select what should be cut out using sponsor block and you choice how many days you want it (videos older that that are automatically deleted)
It started a line of thoughts in me. What if the backend keeps the videos around for a longer period of time, and:
* regularly checks youtube, and whenever one archived video gets deleted from youtube, it advertises the video ID on a specific set of Nostr relays
* have a different browser extension for yt viewers that activates when the user hits a deleted video.
* the backend can stream the video for continuous Bitcoin lightning payment until the stream is kept alive.
Readit News
In the 90s my friend's mom would video tape AMC movies. She had 300+ tapes. Maybe she had a few rare ones but now all those movies are available on demand either legally or illegally and in much better quality. Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves. I doubt he ever opened a single magazine since the moment he saved them. Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them.
To be clear, I have a few youtube videos saved on my local storage. I'm just thinking that saving every video I watch reminds me of the things I've personally over-saved.
Actually that reminds me. I met up with the magazine saving friend recently which is when I verified that he finally got rid of his stash. It made me think about things I'm still saving that if I reflect on I know I will never actually look at. For example I have box of about eight 3.5 inch floppy disks from my Amiga days. The odds that I'm going to get an Amiga or download an Amiga emu and get a drive to read those are close enough to zero that I should throw them away. Similarly I have a book of CD-ROMs of backed up data from the 90s. There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.
https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
Tools to make this easy exist if you already have digital versions.
https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive
And don’t forget to send a few dollars if and when you can.
https://archive.org/donate
(no affiliation, I just like the public good)
I don’t think IA has all early issues of the Microsoft Systems Journal (later MSDN Magazine), among others. So this can be useful. (Also, what kind of person do you think put the magazines up on IA in the first place?..)
My general rule is - if I didn't use it for a year, I don't need it. There are obviously some exceptions like a fire extinguisher (which I hope to never use) and digitized photos, which only go through a careful selection.
I think the thing I kept the longest was a Libranet Linux 3.0 CD set because I worked for Libra Computer Systems for a while and this was the release that I helped building. A few years ago I threw it away, I think after I saw someone uploaded it to archive.org. When I'm 60 and want to install it again for good old time's sake I can.
tl;de: if you don't use something for a year, you probably don't need it.
Almost everything that has become indispensable in my life took years to integrate into my life to any significant degree.
"Need" is a weasel word. You don't need anything.
These expire, so make sure you check yours is still good!
Otherwise I agree with and do basically the same thing. I also make exceptions for most tools and emotional connection items.
I think this was an insidious decision of YouTube. It's like they want to pretend that videos deleted for ToS violations never existed, because by default the playlist does not even display the "holes" that it now has, either.
I prefer to preserve the original artistic works of the producers, directors and screen writers. It could be I am alone in this endeavor and perhaps I am just a hoarder in that regard. I like to watch movies or listen to songs in the way the artists originally intended rather than the current ways that society has determined I should. The exception of course is when a movie is re-mastered and they improve lighting, sound, resolution, etc...
I hesitate to even imagine how AI will sloppify these great works in the future or how they will re-imagine podcasts. The original art will be lost to time and many people will never experience the original results of the blood sweat and tears that went into making them.
Sometimes you're the person who is uploading them to public archives. Because everybody else threw them all away, and you saved them until the technology made archiving practical enough.
I've been replacing all of my physical media for years, but the reason I can do that now is because other people scan/rip and archive/share the stuff. You also have unique stuff that you may not even know is unique. When you find something in your house that you can't find online, scan it and you're paying everybody back for all of the scanning they did for you.
With the CD-ROMs, you should just glide through them one by one and check if you can find the stuff online. If you can, throw them in the trash. If you can't, copy their contents to a folder, and throw them in the trash. Go through the folder over the next hour or next 20 years (however long it takes to get around to it) and take the things you can't find online that you think somebody might want, and get those things to that somebody (uploading to archive.org is always a good place to start.)
edit: I know for a fact that for a lot of people, uploading somewhere on the internet is their standard pre-deletion ritual.
But a personal copy I'm not sure has much point yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
https://archive.org/details/marionstokesvideo
https://recorderfilm.com/
>There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.
More likely scenario, your children, grandchildren or other family members go through your shit after you pass away and discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share.
This is something I think about a lot because I don't have a "digital legacy plan."
I think that's not really likely. I'm pretty sure if you poll you'll find that few children care about their parent's "stuff". You can find plenty of people who've lost parents who found that they didn't have any interest in going through their parents stuff and then from that realized their children would be the same to them.
Most children aren't going to dig through anything more than a physical photo album, and when they do, the only pictures that are relevant to them are those with people they know. The rest only have meaning to the dead parent. They aren't going to dig through hard drives or CDs unless they are searching for financial documents so they can finish up their parent's financial affairs.
> discover stuff about you that perhaps you never wanted to share
I do worry about that. I just tell myself I'll be dead so it doesn't really matter.
Maybe something a bit more selective than this though!
Hoarding is bad when it's costly, due to space, time, or money.
Digital media hoarding is thus not bad at all!
And there’s a number of YouTube videos o wish I could still access.
However, in your examples, the fact those things eventually became available in other forms is not necessarily a counterpoint to your acquaintances having kept them. The specific counterpoint being Marion Stokes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
I think of it like this:
Automatically save everything and spend time deleting the things I don't want to keep. vs Manually saving everything.
"Don't want to keep" depends on disk space and cluttering up the list as it grows. Disk space is not really a thing. I use to have a friend who spend many hours every week cleaning up his 512 GB drive. He was quite obviously deleting things he wanted to keep but "had to" make choices. I just have enough drives to keep 1 to 3 copies of everything. (The single drive will also fail inevitably)
The clutter still seems to happen even if I make the effort to get rid of things. Organizing it a bit, say at least by date is inevitable.
Therefore there is nothing to be gained by wasting time saving things. It is more time efficient to waste time by deleting only enormous folders that you clearly don't need to keep around.
Hoarding is only an appropriate term if you don't have the space for it. If you have an empty airplane hangar a few boxes of foo isn't hoarding.
https://github.com/tubearchivist/browser-extension
I really like the WebUI of Tubearchivist itself.
Deleted Comment
Transcoded (ouch) or just remuxed to a mov container? Have to investigate.
On top of that... seriously, of all the formats one could choose, MOV?! Might as well choose DivX or RealVideo.
But I gave you a cli param of --format
Default is mov but you can pass in mkv
That’s not true at all. QuickTime is far from the best video player, but it’s also not entirely worthless. It can play “modern” popular formats like H264 MP4, which is exactly what YouTube recommends.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en
Which seems a little short sighted to me. VLC or Jellyfin are obviously superior because they're accessible across multiple platforms.
Youtube is an archive like a grocery store is a food archive. [1]
If it was worth watching in the first place, it's worth saving. Reducing the friction of doing so is going to help a lot of people.
(1: I'm getting this quote wrong, what's the actual and attribution??)
https://theoldnet.com
https://timetravel.mementoweb.org
https://perma.cc
https://arquivo.pt
https://www.bl.uk
I found self hosted solution like this but I was very dissatisfied with how that worked
on other hand I wanted to check out loco.rs framework, so I decided to implement my own solution.
basically you are able to add channels/playlists on many many platforms that yt-dlp supports, you can select what should be cut out using sponsor block and you choice how many days you want it (videos older that that are automatically deleted)
if you are interested, you can check it out: https://github.com/Szpadel/LocalTube
So you can make some money on free disk space.