Browser extension and local backend that automatically archives YouTube videos
14 comments
·August 2, 2025socalgal2
mananaysiempre
> Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves.
I don’t think IA has all early issues of the Microsoft Systems Journal (later MSDN Magazine), among others. So this can be useful. (Also, what kind of person do you think put the magazines up on IA in the first place?..)
nemomarx
Getting them on a public shared archive is probably a good outcome though. There was that lady who taped hundreds of hours of daytime TV and archiving that has some interesting historical uses?
But a personal copy I'm not sure has much point yeah.
fcpguru
oh that's not why I want them local. I want to open them in final cut pro and edit them and use parts in other videos. I delete the data folder at the end of each day.
erinnh
Ive been using Tubearchivist with the extension for this.
https://github.com/tubearchivist/browser-extension
I really like the WebUI of Tubearchivist itself.
fcpguru
the main feature I want is to just browse youtube like normal in firefox like I always do. And completely forget starchive is running. Then later in the day I'm pleasntly suprised that any video I want to clip is already downloaded and ready. I never know which one I'll want to download and I don't want to have to click any button.
nemomarx
What are you clipping them for?
computegabe
Interesting. I was looking into creating an extension that manually manipulates and intercepts the vnd.yt-ump [1] requests, then use webcodecs to process everything in the browser.
[1]: https://github.com/gsuberland/UMP_Format/blob/main/UMP_Forma...
fcpguru
oh wow, yeah https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp sounds like the easier path.
mikae1
> Videos are saved to the ./data/ directory and converted to MOV format using ffmpeg with hardware acceleration
Transcoded (ouch) or just remuxed to a mov container? Have to investigate.
fcpguru
the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't like the youtube video format. But the audio can just be copied. My mac's fan never spins with the hardware acceleration so it runs in the background and I just forget about it.
fcpguru
~/os/starchive (main)[56daf7] $ ls -lh data
total 3207312
-rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 525M Aug 2 09:11 2PMzaym-StM.mov
-rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 362M Aug 2 09:10 CHbawkGc_os.mov
-rw-r--r-- 1 aa staff 658M Aug 2 09:11 lqR7VV8ftys.mov
~/os/starchive (main)[56daf7] $ ./starachive
Server starting on port 3009...
JSON received: map[videoId:CHbawkGc_os]
Added video CHbawkGc_os to queue. Queue length: 1
Processing video CHbawkGc_os. Remaining in queue: 0
WithinReason
Now add DHT so clients can download videos from each other as a torrent and you solved global video distribution.
Cool but ... this also sounds like hording behavior. The number of things I've saved over the years only to throw them away years later and realize that saving them in the first place was a waste of time.
In the 90s my friend's mom would video tape AMC movies. She had 300+ tapes. Maybe she had a few rare ones but now all those movies are available on demand either legally or illegally and in much better quality. Another friend kept all of his 1980s computer magazines (Byte, etc...) and moved these extremely heavy boxes through 30+ years of moves. I doubt he ever opened a single magazine since the moment he saved them. Then they all appeared on The Archive and he finally got rid of them.
To be clear, I have a few youtube videos saved on my local storage. I'm just thinking that saving every video I watch reminds me of the things I've personally over-saved.
Actually that reminds me. I met up with the magazine saving friend recently which is when I verified that he finally got rid of his stash. It made me think about things I'm still saving that if I reflect on I know I will never actually look at. For example I have box of about eight 3.5 inch floppy disks from my Amiga days. The odds that I'm going to get an Amiga or download an Amiga emu and get a drive to read those are close enough to zero that I should throw them away. Similarly I have a book of CD-ROMs of backed up data from the 90s. There's a close to 0% chance that I'm never going to bother look at their contents.