Preservetube - A Youtube archival site.

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Breadbassket

True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Nov 22, 2021
PreserveTube is a time capsule for YouTube videos! It allows you to "preserve" any YouTube video, creating a snapshot that will always be available even if the original video disappears or is taken down.

It saves not only the original video, but also descriptions, titles and other interesting metadata.

PreserveTube is dedicated to preserving the legacy of YouTube, one video at a time.

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The only other page it has besides its homepage is one that shows the latest media that has been preserved. This is often a selection of either mundane, strange or controversial videos.

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Uploaded some stuff there. Still dont know how to find it on the site without the original link. Also some of the videos i uploaded came out without any sound which was strange.
Unfortunately Internet archival sites can often be a pain or impossible to navigate without having a link to something so that's nothing new. No clue what the problem is with the sound though.
 
So how long until this goes down due to the amount of storage and bandwidth needed for saving all these videos?
 
So how long until this goes down due to the amount of storage and bandwidth needed for saving all these videos?
I was wondering about the storage. You can store a surprising amount in 1 TB, especially if there are a lot of older, low maximum resolution videos. A few hundred terabytes could go a long way.
 
I do remember a fairground channel that private all his YouTube videos back in March 12, 2017 and I found it annoying when I cannot watch his videos anymore. This site has a potential to be a life saver.

It doesn't seem to preserve Age-Restricted YouTube videos though. But luckily it archives videos that are "Made For Kids" or are Copyright Claimed.
 
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Sadly it doesn't archive age-restricted videos yet. I tried a couple of videos that I know and it throws up this error.

Failed to request Youtube with error !!ErrorYTAgeRestrict!!. Please retry...​

Websocket connection was closed: (1005)
Solving a cryptographic challenge before downloading.
This process is automatic. Your video will start archiving shortly.​


What's the point of the whole thing if you can't archive age-restricted videos? I hope this will be fixed in the future.
 
With how much youtube is experimenting I don't think it'll last long enough for it to matter in the end.


I even had problems using it, it wouldn't save any video sometimes no matter how many times I tried. I'd have to wait 24 hours before it'd work again.
So how long until this goes down due to the amount of storage and bandwidth needed for saving all these videos?
It'll probably stop working with youtube before that happens. Trust me becos blocking and protecting every vid is what will happen with where youtube is headed.
 
I've tried adding some old favorites of mine to the archive given the news about youtube's newest bullshit just in case, but it really seems to hate older stuff from like 10 years ago or more such as playlists. It thinks they're not actual playlist links for some reason, so I'm forced to archive videos 1 by 1. But some videos also ended up losing sound for whatever reason.
 
I don't get it, if I select a channel to archive, does it only save the thumbnails or does it legit download all the videos of the channel? If that's the case that would be amazing to archive some obscure channels that will be nuked sooner or later.
 
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It's working again, but some of the videos I saved during that period now have no audio and can't be rearchived. Lame.

Spoke too soon, I just archived another video and it has no audio. @PreserveTube

Example, tested in Firefox and Chrome to make sure I wasn't the one fucking up:
I first thought it was because of the video containing music, but I tried some videos with no music in it and it still doesn't save the audio. It really has to be fixed because as an archive, this is unacceptable.
 
So I'm not the only one who has been having problems with it not archiving sound. Any alternatives to it ?
 
Looks like it's archiving sound now; I noticed it does separate downloads for both audio and video, then merges them together. However, this doesn't fix the videos that have already been archived but remain soundless. Allowing another chance to properly archive them so they actually have sound saved would be nice.
I also noticed I keep getting "The metadata server unexpectedly closed the websocket. Please try again." messages, or other websocket closed errors for whatever reason. @PreserveTube
 
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