[litiholofan]

It is interesting that youtube is silently removing the ability to watch old videos in HD after making it difficult to sort by oldest on a channel.

I have videos uploaded in 1080p 5 or so years ago now only giving the option to watch in 360p.

Anyone else notice this?

[farseer]

That should be a warning to people who think YouTube and Alphabet by extension has any interest in archiving knowledge for the greater good. This is commercial interest and commercial cost cutting.

[remus]

While I have some sympathy with this position I think it's worth remembering that there's a huge long-tail of absolute rubbish on YouTube.

The fact that they keep it around, for free, over years and years, and at no cost to the user is remarkable to me.

[handsclean]

Yes, YouTube is quite good if your data is absolute rubbish and you’re pleasantly surprised by anything less than full deletion.

[djtango]

Expecting any company to store infinite content for free forever is a bit of a curious expectation

[WeylandYutani]

Yeah I remember when image sites all stopped their free tier a few years ago and it broke a lot of old forum posts.

There's a reason why serious archiving of knowledge is left to government institutions.

[nextlevelwizard]

Is it actually anyways best interest to permanently store everything that has been uploaded to Youtube? I think it would be very reasonable to purge every video uploaded by non-partenered channels that hasn't uploaded in 5 years or the video hasn't been watched in 10 years.

[anticensor]

Let me fix it for you "... it would be very reasonable to purge every public video uploaded by non-partnered channels that hasn't uploaded in 5 years, except the very first and the very last video by that channel, along with the videos that haven't been watched in 10 years."

[Beaver117]

Personally that would delete a lot of niche music videos where it's been like 10 years since they last uploaded to that channel.

[nextlevelwizard]

There is niche and then there is "no one has watched even a second of this in 10 years"

As much as I don't like Google or Youtube - expectation that they will just store whatever stupid stuff you post forever is unreasonable.

Like I posted some gaming highlights when I was teen and I don't think anyone, but I have ever watched them and I don't even have access to that account anymore. All of that stuff should be deleted.

Even now I occasionally have itch to make a video and I am the only one who watches them, but at least they are good enough for me that I return to watch them.

[interestica]

There's some sort of change going on behind the scenes. I have a bunch of 5k (2880s) footage in YouTube that now maxes out at 4k (2160). YouTube silently removed all 5k versions of videos (nothing between 4 and 8k now).

It really seems like they may put 4k and above into their YouTube premium offering or something?

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6375112 >Note: In 2022, we started removing support for playback at resolutions between 4K and 8K. For example, we may no longer support playback at 5K.

[noitpmeder]

I guess it's not exactly shocking... what better way to reduce their storage requirement than to downsample old and not-frequently-watched content.

I bet 95%+ of videos on the platform fall into this bucket.

[litiholofan]

Notification of this fact by youtube would've been nice to be honest - and perhaps a way to pay to keep them in high quality.

[samtheprogram]

Highly unlikely, we’re talking about Google here.

[b112]

One day, the future may regard YouTube, as BBC, who recycled and overwrote Dr Who tapes to save a few bucks.

And lost handsomely as a result.

[wolfi1]

in fact, unfortunately, almost every TV station did that in that time, some of them preserved their material on film, but unfortunately not all of their material

[b112]

TV station?

Dr Who wasn't a daily, TV station talk show, and Studios tend to archive.

The BBC gets the footnote in history, here.

[0cVlTeIATBs]

The most egregious example I know of is a "60fps audio video sync test" now only available in 30fps

[ikekkdcjkfke]

Yup, they are potentially ruining rare moments captured

[maximus-decimus]

I should probably download all the old music videos I care about before it's too late

[npteljes]

A local copy is a good step forward for content you truly care about. I don't think there's any service you can really count on the decade long term. Meanwhile, I still have the music and photo collection from all my life. Is is a worthy pursuit? The more I grow, the less I think so. Does it work? Absolutely yes.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ is your best friend.