That's unfortunate. I have a few videos which seems to have been forgotten even by their uploaders. Those videos would probably not be updated. I guess I need to back them up manually.
I have one video in my favorites that is marked as unavailable. This drives me crazy I'll never know what that video was. I only have a couple videos in my favorites and every single one of them is important to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or uploaders who have died and may have unlisted videos and linked to them in descriptions or comments.
I don't recall the creator, but I do recall a video series that used links in the videos that pointed to other videos for a basic quiz or choose your own adventure.
Honestly I have been doing this with all kinds of content, if I ever reference it to make a point, use it to understand a topic, etc I have a local backup of the video, webpage etc.
Too many times I have gone back to reference something only for the site to be dead, or the user been banned from the platform.
Yes. I always tell people that if they really love a YouTube video they need to archive it themselves. Tons and tons of content gets erased all the time for many different reasons. Just recently I found two of my favorite channels, popular around a decade ago, had deleted almost all their content because their jokes were too offensive for today's audience and they wanted to project a more mature aesthetic. That would've been a huge chunk of my early adulthood gone forever if I hadn't already had copies of all their videos.
If you feel like chatting with others who also archive youtube content, consider stopping by my discord server: https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf
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, and occasionally direct efforts to preserve specific content- like unlisted videos right now.
