24/04/2022
I used to save every picture I came across online that I liked, just in case I ever needed them. Somewhere along the line I stopped. Now my pictures folder lay woefully empty after a succession of childhood laptops with mysteriously empty hard drives. Media is getting lost. Servers are going dark, and their contents evaporate on the wind. Its time everyone starts hoarding anything they find worth hoarding.
yt-dlp can allow you to save all those Youtube videos that teeter on the edge of being taken down.
yt-dlp works in the command line so it can be strange to use if you aren’t used to such programs but its highly versatile and it’s father yt-dl was taken down from even DuckDuckGo’s search results so using it is going against big tech in some small way. Make sure you install FFmpeg too.
Pasting this into your command line replacing the red text with your youtube video/channel/playlist url will begin downloading.
yt-dlp --embed-subs --embed-metadata --merge-output-format mkv YOUTUBE HTTP LINK
Here is a sample command to convert a video file into an mp3 using FFmpeg
INPUT-FILE.mkv ffmpeg -i -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 128k -f mp3 OUTPUT-FILE.mp3
Also, you can use the program HTTrack to download webpages to hoard.
One day you might be the only one left with a certain file, and it'll be your duty to host it.