Open Atemu opened 2 months ago
I jinxed it, huh?
someone did a similar thing with https://www.altcensored.com which seems to be based on invidious. it is used for unlisted and soon to be deleted videos (and channels).
though its code is no longer available and its videos are on archive.org which based on recent news is not as reliable as before against copyright lawyers.
Describe the feature
As Youtube enshittifies further and further, the risk increases that beloved videos become inaccessible to Piped or even entirely inaccessible. It's easy to imagine scenarios where existing videos become DRM'd (I'm honestly surprised it hasn't happened for Music videos yet), whole channels deleted and/or piped instances blocked.
To mitigate this, it'd be amazing if the piped back-end could download/archive/cache videos before that happens. The users and/or admins would populate this archive via commands and policies such as:
Piped would then download the videos and metadata to be archived in a configurable maximum resolution.
When Piped would later fail to reach upstream YouTube for content that had been downloaded previously, the cache/archive would transparently be used to serve the data.
Basically, piped should be able to operate in a limited degree without Youtube being present.
Why would this be useful to add?
Concept(s)
No response
Additional context
This would require quite a bit of storage space of course but storage is cheap these days; I'd gladly pay a couple dozen EUR to store a few TiB worth of my favourite creators past creations.
Download quality could also be decided based on the policy which triggered it. I.e. super low resolution versions for downloads automatically triggered by users watching a video. 144p needs <20KiB per second of video cached/archived (including audio) and even that is immeasurably better than nothing at all. At 15€/TiB (common price for large HDDs), that's about 0.001€ per hour of video; for 100€, you could archive 100,000h of content or about 400,000 15min videos.
Acknowledgements