Backing up some youtube videos
I spend most of time lately programming my games, but lately, in preparation for a trip to Japan, I started learning Japanese. There is this set of videos about Japan grammar that are well thought and presented, however, it’s creator passed away recently.
Now, I am not sure what will happens to the videos. There is this saying that once something is on internet, it never dissapear, but it’s simply untrue. Websites dissapear everyday, content is erased by their creator or by some tech overlord. Even if there is a lot of ways to get back deleted content, the best, if you care about some content, is to keep your own backup.
This is why I chose to download all videos from a playlist. The spirit of this blog, and this section of particular is describing the steps made to achieve something, in case someone (most likely myself) will need to check it later.
First I tried to use youtube-dl. As often, it did not work and I had to get through various issues on github. They fixed the issue (in relation to google changing their API I believe), but it was not straightforward to get the update. One of the comment in the discussion advised to get the fork yt-dlp and I used that instead. This worked and I was able to get all the videos on my hard drive by launching:
yt-dlp -P '/my/path' -o "%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" 'https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj'