youtube-dl is a libre software project which runs on all major operating systems which allows you to download video from most (non-DRM) video streaming websites into a file stored locally on your computer that you can keep and watch offline. It's a great tool for many, many reasons. For one thing, it allows you to download videos from a YouTube link without navigating directly to the website, subverting any ads and allowing someone to watch videos without needing a modern-enough web browser to parse the massive and slow YouTube web page and use the video player in the browser. To make this use case even more effective, it even allows you to specify a highest possible quality for the downloaded video so you don't download anything your computer can't handle playing. It's also great for people who want to redownload their own videos that they've lost the original copies of in the best quality available where they uploaded it so they have a backup in case it gets taken down. It also works very well in conjunction with RSS to allow for a different and less harmful way of experiencing all the benefits of a YouTube account. And again, all of these features work on almost all sites, including independent PeerTube instances for example, all condensed into one tool. If you need even more features, there's also the fork yt-dlp to look at as well, which is what I personally use.
But all of these features, as useful and great as they are, pale in comparison to the most important use of youtube-dl: internet video preservation. When I started using the internet in the early years of YouTube, there was so much great content on there that was worthy of preservation - both as a time capsule for future generations, and also because the content was genuinely funny, informative, or historically meaningful. Early angry video game reviews; memes like Numa Numa or Technoviking; silly channels like the Microwave Show: all of these videos were a part of my life when I was younger, and I want to have access to them for as long as possible. Thankfully, almost all of these videos still exist today, and this is due partially to the luck we all had that YouTube stayed the dominant platform, so legacy videos uploaded as far back as 15+ years ago are still being hosted to this day. But, many other videos are reuploads or archives from the originals, which only exist thanks to tools like youtube-dl (and the odd screen recording, which now because of youtube-dl is unnecessary). Just think about how many videos were lost when Blip.tv went out of business, for people who remember that fiasco (and, thankfully, how many were saved thanks to archive channels and video downloading software).
Watching a recent video from Stop Skeletons From Fighting brought up a scary and powerful way of thinking about the history of these videos: when the Angry Video Game Nerd made his first video about Castlevania II: Simon's Quest which started the entire internet reviewer and retro game craze, he recorded it in 2004. That was 17 years after the game came out. Now, in turn, it's been a full 18 years since that first AVGN video was recorded. These videos are going to be the world's next wave of retro nostalgia very, very soon, but unlike movies or tv shows, there doesn't exist high quality, high production value copies of most of this material, and the uploads of uploads of uploads on YouTube of some of them will slowly degrade in quality into being unwatchable (save some kind of AI reconstructing of the videos in the future). The only tool that we as random human beings on Earth have at our disposal to preserve and keep alive these videos and their legacy is tools like youtube-dl. The entire reason we have any kind of significant internet legacy (especially in a world where YouTube has become more and more strict and removes more and more channels and videos, retroactively, without warning, and without cause) is due primarily to tools like youtube-dl.
I wish that youtube-dl was a household name and everybody knew how to use it. In fact, I think that youtube-dl is one very strong example of a tool that should have a good, cross-platform graphical user interface so that it could reach the most people possible, which it does not currently. However, ironically, one of the biggest hurdles to spreading the word about youtube-dl is YouTube itself. Even mentioning youtube-dl in a video is grounds for the video to be removed and perhaps even having a strike on your channel, both because of their personal desire to harvest money from you for watching ads, and also to appease vultures like the RIAA. This short-sightedness is extremely damaging to our society and our history as people, encouraging a consume-and-discard view of videos instead of a preserve-and-cherish mindset. Personally, as I think about if I ever have kids and what I'd want to show them when they grew up, I find the latter mindset much more appealing. Particularly because all the new videos on YouTube are so corporate, manipulative, and awful (staged Minecraft challenges, dumb rich people putting big dollar amounts in a video title, ads for mobile games, etc.). There was something so genuine and real and funny and groundbreaking about all these old videos that really set the stage for the current internet-dominated society we currently live in.
September 7, 2022