The Cinemateca Brasileira was ravaged by a fire last Thursday, on June 27. A core institution for preserving Brazillian cinematography, the Cinemateca was estimated to house over 2000 films and 4 tons of documents in its archives. Artists and conservationists had expressed their concerns on the frailty of the material housed in the Cinemateca, as early as April of this year, noting for instance, the risk of self-combustion of cellulose nitrate films.

According to the local fire brigade, the fire began after maintenance on the air-conditioning system. After assessing the damage, Fire captain Karina Paula Moreira announced -regrettably- that “we will only know for certain after the experts (i.e. forensics), but, probably, nothing was preserved”. A grim end, to remind us all how media preservation is NOT a thing postponable.

New Projects

YouTube finally privated pre-2017 unlisted videos last week, after a delay of a few days. But that wasn’t the end of the story, we still have a few archiving projects and tools to talk about.

Our good friend Jopik has made a TamperMonkey script for revealing the original name and uploader of privated videos in your playlists, not unlike a certain other project from a few months ago.

Jopik was also behind the filmot collection) and that’s actually where the info is being fed in from. You can install the filmot Title Restorer script from here.

Another WIP project is rebane2001’s playlist restorer which will also be able to grab thumbnails and even the videos themselves, if available. Unfortunately, this tool is undownloadable at this time so we will have to settle for the Reddit trailer for now.

Updates

Speaking of YouTube’s unlisted videos, Archive Team’s grabs have landed in the ArchiveTeam Inbox collection on the Internet Archive. In case you are out of the loop, Archive Team grabbed 200 TiB of data on 5,739,754 videos! Titles, comments and low-resolution copies of the original videos!

Last year, when Yahoo Groups shut down archivists pooled together data on different groups and published them on the Internet Archive. Now, the Save Yahoo Groups! project is looking for help in identifying fan groups.

TV Shows, literature, games… If you have had any history on Yahoo Groups prior to its shut-down, or consider yourself a fandom enthusiast, we implore you to head over to the SYG Discord Server or their fandom identification spreadsheet.

The latest version of MAME (0.234), the arcade machine emulator, focuses on 3D arcade games. You are in luck if you were in the mood for some GTI Club! Read more about it on MAME’s blog!

YouTube is a platform and a community which live off of reuploads. One might even go so far as to say that reuploads have been a key to YouTube’s success and reuploads themselves have been a product of YouTube. With recent events in mind, now is a good time as ever to re-examine the mutually beneficial relationship between YouTube and the practice of reuploading.

In 2005, YouTube started off as a small video-sharing site. At the time few people would have been able to predict that it would grow to be the 2nd most popular site on the web and yet here we are! One factor Co-founder Jawed Karim attributes their success to is timeliness. In particular, he thinks YouTube came at a time when clip sharing became very common. To quote from a talk he gave in 2006:

The “clip culture” you see now is basically this demand that you can find any video at any time and you can share it with other people, or you can share your own videos with other people. […]

There were a couple of events in 2004 that kind of fueled this. One was this [wardrobe malfunction]. So this, of course, happened on television, but it only happened once and never again. And so for anyone who wanted to see it after that, well they had to find it online. The other big event I remember is this [Stewart on Crossfire] interview. And you know this was also shown on television once and not after that. Everyone was talking about it, but people who missed it really wanted to be in on the joke so they would try to find it online…

Jawed Karim, r | p 2006: YouTube: From Concept to Hypergrowth (25:15)

YouTube was able to meet this clip demand, acting as a universal replay button for any clip people could imagine. It’s no coincidence that obscure/lost media fanatics were flocking to the site not soon after its launch. From Sesame Street shorts to TV pilots, old footage quickly piled up! YouTube had an entire subculture of video remixes called YouTube Poops, which were made from recycled clips from old TV shows and games.

Alas this clip culture was both the boon and bane of early YouTube. As users uploaded these clips liberally, some of the owners and rights holders of the original source material of said clips came to view this practice as copyright infringement. This tension led to the infamous
Viacom vs. YouTube case in 2007, where media giant Viacom sued YouTube and Google for $1 billion in alleged damages! If you are looking for a good summary, EmpLemon did a video on it a few years ago.

Viacom did not actually win the case, in fact it came to light that they had taken advantage of clip culture for a stealth marketing campaign of their own. But the whole ordeal had lasting effects on YouTube. In an attempt to appease intellectual property owners, YouTube introduced their content ID system, then called video ID, for automatically detecting copyright infringing videos.

(Video Identification ~ YouTube Advertisers. If the above video is unavailable please use this Wayback Snapshot)

All of a sudden, videos on YouTube became a whole lot more volatile. This automated system did not only take down a lot of infringing material, but it also hit false positives, matching short-length clips, remixes and video reviews as well. At one point you would have been lucky to have had a few of your videos deleted, as opposed to having your whole channel terminated for seemingly having one too many copyright strikes. Yet clip culture on YouTube has somehow been able to endure, even beyond this era.

The term reupload probably first entered the YouTube lexicon when users began uploading new, higher quality versions of videos on their channel as YouTube kept introducing higher caps to video quality. These YouTube upgrades came around the same time as Content ID, so you will find cases where the reupload of a video has survived but the original has been deleted.

It wasn’t just the video makers themselves who were reuploading though, soon other users also began reuploading downloaded copies they had made of their favorite YouTube videos. This was not merely due to fans appreciating content from their fellow YouTubers, but also due to the fact that the frequent channel terminations could deny the original uploader the right to reupload their channel’s videos in the first place.

Ironically, the term reupload soon was associated with degredation in quality as people began reuploading videos over and over again. There’s even a Gizmodo article about it from 2010. There have also been people who have complained about their work being reuploaded without permission or credit, worse yet plagiarised. Clearly, reuploads are a great power that came with great responsibility. Still, many diligent channels are dedicated to preserving the memory of original content through its reuploads.

The fear of such memories being lost through mass-deletions looms over YouTube, even today. Early ContentID was certainly not the last disaster to plague YouTube videos. Hacker pranks, copyright trolls, the Adpocalypse and Elsagate controversies have all taken their toll on many unfortunate channels. Today, we once more find ourselves on the brink of a scene similar to a mass-deletion, with the mass-privating of unlisted videos uploaded prior to 2017.

A few years ago it was discovered that YouTube video IDs were being generated according to a certain pattern and it was thus theoretically possible to predict video links. This presented a problem for unlisted videos, which were meant to be videos that were to be shared by link only.

Unlisted videos are a tricky subject; on one hand, a video might be unlisted, rather than privated, to make it easier to share with friends. On the other hand, many YouTubers also unlist videos such as outtakes, early revisions of videos, stream archives or off-topic content that might not fit their channel’s niche. Such videos are linked to, in video descriptions, pinned comments or Tweets. So while some unlisted videos aren’t meant for everyone’s eyes, other unlisted videos are only hidden from the channel interface and search results. Yet an exploit is an exploit, and URL predictability could be a serious problem for certain videos.

Some action certainly had to be taken here, so in 2017 the video ID formula was changed into something less predictable, that was definitely a step in the right direction. What is happening today, 4 and a half years after, is a security update to set a sizable number of unlisted videos uploaded prior to that date to private. Thus, several million videos have suddenly been virtually deleted, as they are no longer accessible to anyone but the channel owner. While this decision will secure potentially private content for many channels, it is also a great loss for inactive channels who unlisted videos liberally and were not able to opt-out of the decision.

On the bright side, channels which are still active can set their videos to public at a later date. In fact, YouTube goes so far as to encourage these channels to re-upload their own videos to be able to take advantage of the new URL system. Except, it’s just not the original uploaders and video makers who are reuploading. Reuploads from other users who had previously downloaded unlisted videos are starting to also pop up, the same as it ever was.

With tools like youtube-dl or Reddit’s SaveVideo, the YouTube community is pulling together to salvage whatever they can from old unlisted videos. And they are getting only better, Archive Team’s unlisted video project hit over 200TB of data. As videos die off, here are some folks desperately trying to revive them, trying to uphold what one might call their online heritage.

A few days ago one of the oldest videos on YouTube was made public from unlisted. It was originally uploaded on April 29, 2005. Titled Premature Baldness, it too is a reupload and final memento from a chasebrown.com which is no longer recognizable. A whisper to remind us that while invoking the right to be forgotten we ought not to neglect, on the other hand, a right to be remembered…

Fortunately, Archive Team has started a project to back up the metadata and 360p resolution video files for as many of these items as possible, and contributing is really easy! In addition to the videos themselves, data to be archived by this project includes the video watch page (including titles, descriptions, uploader channel, etc.), captions, comments, attributions, and thumbnails. The data archived by this project will be made available in WARC format on the Internet Archive and through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

To help out with this project, simply follow the steps to download and run an Archive Team Warrior, and then select the YouTube project. (You can also run the project using a Docker container using atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/youtube-grab as the image address.)

Additionally, people with lists of unlisted video IDs/URLs and unlisted playlist IDs/URLs are encouraged to share them so they can be archived.

In order to stay up-to-date with the project and be reachable in case of an issue, project contributors are encouraged to connect and stay connected to the project discussion channel, #down-the-tube on irc.hackint.org, also available through webchat.

Archiving progress statistics for this project are available on the Archive Team project tracker, and source code is available on GitHub.

After older unlisted videos are made private on July 23, this project will shift to archiving the metadata for as many YouTube videos as possible, though not the actual video files themselves in most cases due to the amount of storage video takes and limited resources of the Internet Archive.

Public Interest crusader and Internet Archive partner Sherwin Siy was reported to have passed on 7 July, 2021, at the age of 40. Through the span of his career, Sherwin Siy served as Public Knowledge‘s VP of Legal Affairs, helped shape the Public Policy of Wikimedia and had a long history of cooperating with the EFF.

Sherwin Siy’s contribution to the Internet Archive was making sense of how the Archive handled TV news, from a legal perspective, as reported by Lila Bailey, his former partner in law. Suffice to say, news archives on IA such as the Third Eye news chyron collection might have never came to be, were it not for his efforts.

Updates

Bluemaxima’s Flashpoint, the webgame preservation project/community, finally has a dedicated submission website at https://fpfss.unstable.life/web. Previously, game submissions were made through their Discord server and had to await a laborious approval/rejection process. Let us hope, that this change will make archiving efforts a whole lot easier. You can read more about the how-to of it here.

Again on the subject of Flashpoint, the community has taken it upon themselves to preserve interactive “YouTube games”. As known to our longtime readers, once upon a time YouTube had an annotation system which could be used to link videos together. Some folks went out of their way to make Choose Your Adventure styled games, where depending on your choices, you would be taken to another video. But after the feature’s removal in 2019, many channels unlisted their annotation-intensive videos and now with YouTube’s plans to forcibly private old unlisted videos, these games are at risk of extinction. To help out with the Flashpoint project to preserve these video games, head over to the #youtube-games channel on the Flashpoint Discord Server.

With 11 days to go before the delisting of unlisted videos, archivists are working around the clock to hunt down unlisted videos. All the projects we discussed last week are still in motion; from Archive Team’s metadata scraping on #[email protected], to subreddit frenzies for harvesting videos linked on the filmot.com index.

Another noteworthy project is the #youtube-unlisted project on the Distributed YouTube Archive. A major bottleneck for Archive Team, and other groups, has been archiving of raw video files, as the Internet Archive and Google Cloud are not suited for a sudden influx of large video files. The DYA project, aims to mitigate this by splitting the task of storage between contributors. If a video is requested for download, the contributors who have made a copy of that video share their copy. While this might seem like a tedious process, it means that anyone with spare space can contribute to the storage, without TBs of hardware.

Finally, Omniarchive is holding a competition to collect Minecraft related unlisted videos.

What do I get out of it?
We will be giving 1 month of Discord Nitro, as well as a unique Discord role, and credit on the Omniarchive index, to the three users who submit the highest number of unique, valid videos.

How can I help?
Simply all you need to do is post as many UNLISTED Minecraft videos uploaded on or before 31st December 2011 into #unlisted-videos as you can possibly find. That’s it. If you find an unlisted Minecraft video uploaded anywhere from 2009-2011, post it! We’ll handle the rest using a few scripts to filter out any duplicates and other unwanted links. Check out this link for a detailed guide on how you can find such videos: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HMeoH7XOpUvqBkUD1jBy5MfzgzK4X4wgUpzV2YIZ4Fs/view

HalfOfAKebab, Omniarchive Mod

Are you involved with an archiving project related to YouTube’s unlisted videos, or not? Reach out to us at [email protected] so we can give you a shoutout!

Long time SNES manual preservationist, author and contributor to numerous emulation projects and friend to many game preservationists Near/Byuu has passed away on June 27, 2021.

Earlier that day, they had sent out a series of Tweets to the effect of a suicide letter. Wishing to remain anonymous, the last person to have talked to Near prior to their death would soon contact Hector Martin “marcan”, believing them to have taken their own life while on the phone. Several hours later the event was confirmed by local police.

This tragic turn of events had followed episodes of harassment, which Near detailed in their final words. Their parting request was that they be remembered for their many contributions to the community, and not for they were about to undertake.

Shutdowns

Last Wednesday, on June 23, YouTube announced a decision to automatically set all Unlisted Videos uploaded prior to 2017 to private, one month later on July 23. The difference being that; unlisted videos are hidden from search results, but people with the link can access them, whereas private videos are inaccessible to other users unless the uploader gives manual approval.

While channels have the ability to opt-out, to keep their unlisted videos unlisted, and not privated, it has come to the attention of archivists that many inactive channels are unlikely to pick this option given the short timeframe presented.

In the way of archiving projects for unlisted videos, there has already been much discussion and some organization on #down-the-tube on hackint, Hacker News, r/datahoarder and the Distributed YouTube Archive. Alas, there is yet no project in motion, at this time.

The Unlisted Videos website, which was made specifically for the purpose of collecting links to unlisted videos, has been scraped or is being scraped by several groups, worth about half a million videos. There is also Jopik’s searchable collection of 4.5 million unlisted videos, which is a monument in its own right. That being said, these are only links, and the video files themselves have yet not been mirrored. So be sure to stay tuned for upcoming projects.

To spread awareness of the situation, we are doing countdown of unlisted videos on the Data Horde Twitter account.

This upcoming change from YouTube comes with a similar update to Google Drive, which will render many shared files inaccessible to users who have not accessed them prior to a certain date.

Updates

In support of the efforts to archive unlisted videos, Sponsorblock has introduced a new feature to detect, and anonymously submit links to unlisted videos, that users might be watching.

The Flash Player emulator Ruffle, is now a bit easier to install. Ruffle has finally been added as an extension to the Chrome Web Store, and you can run it from the comfort of Chromium browsers.

In other news, the mod community/archive Gamebanana suffered a major outage over the weekend. Thankfully, as it turns out, this hiccup was only the result of a billing glitch on their host’s side. The site is now up and running once more.

Can you believe our host accidentally suspended 16 of our servers due to a billing glitch, and nobody was around to fix it because it’s a Sunday. This is the biggest host blooper we’ve ever encountered in 20 years.

tom, Gamebanana Admin

Discoveries

Members of Omniarchive, a group dedicated to archiving old lost versions of Minecraft, managed to recover the elusive Alpha 1.1.1. version on June 25, 2021. The first of many Seecret updates, Alpha 1.1.1. was notable for being online for only a few hours before the Alpha 1.1.2 hotfix.

Archivist ProffApple found a tweet someone who had just downloaded the update had made over a decade ago on the day that Alpha 1.1.1. came out, September 18, 2010 to be specific. Turns out, they still had the game files lying around!

You can read more about the story on this Kotaku Article by Zack Zwiezen and this PC Gamer article by Jonathan Bolding.

Unlisted videos are videos which are hidden from search results, but can still be shared in links and playlists. These are distinct from Private videos, which are only visible to the channel owner and owner-approved users. Unlisting a video is preferable to privating in cases such as behind the scenes or alternate take videos. You also have prank videos, legacy courses on educational channels; really, unlisting a video has been the go-to option for when people want to continue hosting their old videos instead of deleting them.

Edit 5 July: This change also applies to pre-2017 unlisted playlists, as pointed out on this page, slightly out of view.

In 2017, YouTube changed how links were generated for Unlisted videos. Next month, they are officially retiring older Unlisted videos by privating them, by default. This means that a lot of links on/off of YouTube will break, after all 2005 to 2017 is 12 whole years! But don’t despair, just yet. If you, as an uploader, have old Unlisted videos on your channel you have a few other options:

• Make your Unlisted videos Public.
• Re-upload your Unlisted videos, and again unlist them so you can share their new links.
• Fill out a form to keep your Unlisted videos Unlisted! Be forewarned that it might take up to 24 hours for YouTube to get back to you.

You have one month, until 23 July 2021 to decide which of these options best suits your needs. Note that you can later unlist your automatically privated videos from the YouTube Studio, even if you don’t opt-out, according to this Support Page. 23 July is, however, the deadline for viewers to mirror or download any pre-2017 Unlisted videos they might have access to.

A copy of YouTube’s e-mail can be found below for your reading pleasure. Be sure to stay tuned to Data Horde for upcoming updates on Unlisted videos and related projects!