Live data from Hacker News

Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

github.com

81–90 of 148 posts

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#81
post #64
post #45

Afrer reading the description, this project seems to be solely focused on downloading all of a specific channel's videos. I've been taking my first steps at having a home server, and one of the things I'd love to do with it is having an archive of the videos that I have saved in my private playlists on YouTube. In my mind, the service would periodically check all my playlists, compare with what exists locally, and do…

Yark will be able to do this in v1.3 releasing in ~1 month provided it has access to the playlists, I'm not sure how to do creds currently but I'll look into it. Issue for downloading playlists: https://github.com/Owez/yark/issues/49

That's great to know!

For auth it seems the preferred way to login with Google is OAuth2, that's I believe what third-party apps use, e.g. Thunderbird uses it when setting up a new GMail account.

However, for apps that don't support OAuth2, there is also the possibility of using "App Passwords" [1], I've used one in the past and it worked well. (Update: I'm just reading it only works if 2FA is enabled, which I use)

[1]: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#83

Does this have the ability to bet set to "grab highest available resolution" instead of specifying one? A lot of the material I'd like to archive has material from well before and after Youtube started supporting HD resolutions.

I am fairly sure that if this uses yt-dlp with the default options it will grab whatever is the highest available resolution video (and most modern codec) and merge it with the highest quality available audio track.

same as just "yt-dlp https://url-of-video" from a CLI

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#84
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unbelievable that Wikipedia is free and survives on donations. Youtube sells ads and is subsidized by one of the biggest ad companies in the world that happens to have a lot of cheap cloud storage available.

YT is not subsidized by Google, it makes a profit. The scale of storage and serving is not of any real comparable scale.

I wonder how many orders of magnitude separate the amount of data stored in YouTube vs Wikipedia? 5? 6? How about data served by them?

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#85
post #78
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally in modern adaptive streaming, every video variant is muxed into a separate stream without audio, and different audio variants are muxed into their own individual streams.

wow, I wonder if that's why it always feels so frequent an experience of mine where the audio and video feel subtly out of sync with one another. It's very minute but detectable. Feels like that experience has increased in the last 6 months or so.

YouTube has been that way (separate streams) for a long time, definitely not anything new in the last 6 months. And they reassemble to be indistinguishable from the original combined stream, so that's not going to be the cause.

There are plenty of causes of delayed audio, however. Bluetooth is a big one, if your device and software aren't properly compensating for the Bluetooth transmission delay.

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#86

Did you write your own YouTube scraper, which would be quite a task, or is this based on something like ytdl? Might be worth mentioning in the readme.

> Might be worth mentioning in the readme.

i mean, it's not really important to a user which ever library it uses to scrape youtube - i suppose it's important if you want to contribute/develop it.

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#87
post #16
post #13

How cool would it be if everyone had IPFS running in their browser, and everyone dedicated some time to filling it with a backup of the internet, including YouTube.

I did some napkin math. If 1 billion people each backed up 10gb, we’d almost have enough to store a copy of YouTube with zero data redundancy. Google is massive.

That's impressive indeed, but if we boil it down to just the things that are worth saving, removing duplicates, long and pointless livestreams, long videos that are just endless loops, etc., it could be done with much less space. If we also ignore auto generated spam[1] and harmful content (Elsagate, etc.), it would require even less.

It's a nice thought experiment, but we really don't need to archive all of YT. That's why I appreciate projects like this and yt-dlp that allow me to not just archive what I'm interested in, but to watch it when and how I want, without Google tracking my every move, and interrupting every few minutes with ads. Paying for YT Premium only partially solves the second issue. I don't want to see sponsored content either.

[1]: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Roel_Van_de_Paar

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#88
post #70

Anyone know if Apple bans this kind of lib from use in the app store?

There have been iOS video players with such functionality built-in whose authors have had to remove the functionality at Apple's request.

Thank you. I have a couple like that and didn’t know how confident to be with replicating

It seems Apple is fine with adblocking by default for web content, but inconsistently as with youtube. Hard to predict what's risky to invest dev time into

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#89
post #2

I've been working on polishing my YouTube archiver project for the last while and I've finally released a solid version of it, it has an offline web viewer/visualiser for archived channels and it's managed using a cli. Most importantly, its easy to use :)

I like it, it's much better than what I've used previously.

I made a docker container to run it (https://github.com/na4ma4/docker-yark), when I get time I'll do a PR if you're interested so it isn't a separate project.

(I'll also fix it so the host is a command line argument not just changing the binding from 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0)

Re: Yark: Advanced and easy YouTube archiver now stable

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not see how that becomes possible without the Internet archive effectively mirroring a large percentage of YouTube. I recall at one point, IA wanted to archive just the video metadata and realized even that would be technically challenging.

IA does seems to archive YT video content, at least last time I tried to watch a deleted but popular video.

Only if a user chooses to submit the URL - I think parent comment is referring to an organized attempt by IA to archive a significant portion of YT's videos.
Post reply on HN