HACKER Q&A
📣 lifeplusplus

I want to save every video I like on YouTube?


Youtube deletes everything eventually. I need a way to save all videos I like across mulitple accounts into somewhere safe. Obviously cloud would be too expensive so I'll probably would have to make local NAS Raid 1 10 Tb setup or something. But is there a service? That charges like $10/month max. Would that service be safe from DMCA?


  👤 smoldesu Accepted Answer ✓
I think YouTube has a big public playlist of all your liked videos. Feed it into yt-dlp and choose a good format (eg. yt-dlp -f "22" "youtube.com/your/playlist/here"), and it will spit out all the videos in the playlist to whatever directory you're in.

👤 retrac
If you're willing to sacrifice some quality, it seems feasible to just download and store it locally. At 500 kbit/s for mediocre standard definition, it works out to about 200 MB per hour of video. At that rate a 4 terabyte drive would store ~20,000 hours or ~3 continuous years worth of video, which is probably several decades worth of typical YouTube viewing, assuming you watch the whole clip.