I saw a person post a really good comment in regards to this a few days ago. They said they don’t want their kids going on YouTube. But there are videos they want to watch on YouTube. So they download the videos and put them on their media server. So the kids have their own playlist of videos to watch.

YT videos get taken down for any reason these days - fake copyright claims, hacking or just the creator getting fed up with YT’s policies. Entire channels vanish with no warning. Valuable videos that generate income suddenly become private only. It is not an open platform, it’s a monetised platform first and foremost.

If you have these videos under your control, then if they’re no longer watchable online, you still have them. That’s exactly what TA is for and does a superb job of. Basically every YT video I watch that I think is useful, I hit the Save button. Some of them are indeed no longer available. I have entire channels downloading so if the creator does close up shop, at least I’ve got their latest.

Obviously you need a lot of storage space - mine is over 5TB and growing. But it’s worth it.

Also, it avoids the YT before, mid and after ads.

Niche reason: I’m in China and YouTube is blocked. My server has VPN access, but my Kodi system on my TVs doesn’t.

That said, I hadn’t heard of this project, but I’ll probably install it now instead of manually using yt-dlp.

I just use it to be prepared in case youtube wins the ongoing adblocking war.

Me and my wife use it as a personal YouTube without the ads. The webui is good enough and with the companion app we can go to YouTube and pick out whatever videos we want to watch. The download and processing takes at most a minute or two for me. It passed the wife test and that’s good enough for me.

For me it’s more than just preservation. It’s about an ad free experience and controlling what my kids consume from the platform.

Have you never seen content you like disappear from the internet without a trace?

Whether it’s music that your streaming provider no longer has license for, media that gets dropped by Amazon or Netflix, or content on YouTube that’s here one day and gone tomorrow?

If you haven’t, stick around a bit!

I use tubesync.

Tube Archiving?

It’s also quite easy to use. I used it for example to download yt video on my phone before taking off on plane.

Years ago there was this funny clip of Ben Affleck doing various different Boston accents on the Jimmy Kimmel show. Super funny and became one of those clips that I would seek out a few times a year to rewatch and have a laugh.

It got pulled for for copyright or something which was weird because its really like a 3 minute clip. In any event its gone, forever. Cant find it anywhere.

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Tubearchivist allows us to grab things we plan on rewatching over and over.

Like his name and what most of people explain, you archive videos and keep them locally whatever happens to them online.

But, personnaly, I use it mostly to watch videos with a better latency and almost no loading time, and I feel TubeArchivist very confortable to use (I use FreeTube as well, for less important channels) as you can share play status between clients.

I only keep videos I want to archive. I delete most of them.

I can’t tell you how many channels have disappeared and been memory-holed. Especially since censorship went into overdrive around 2019.

Data hoarders can show you how the world was before all that happened.

What if that content isn’t there tomorrow?

Imagine your favorite youtuber decide to just delete their channel… how would you re-watch their content or watch the content you never watched originally…

Essentially it’s the same use case as DVD’s and Blurays… they exist so you can watch the content when you want to regardless of whether they are still available on the original platform.