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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/Disasterpiece115 on 2024-01-23 00:57:26+00:00.
Original Title: Video platform Vbox7 is about to restrict access to nearly all its' videos - after public outcry, they delayed this decision for a period of 1 month. Tons of memories and integral parts of early Bulgarian internet culture are about to be lost, unless they're saved during this 1 month window.
What is vbox7.com?
- A Bulgarian video-sharing site founded in 2006. It has hosted countless beloved and obscure videos, many of them unique to the site (and to Bulgaria) itself - over 14M videos overall.
- It also contains a lot of otherwise "lost" media (foreign movies, TV series) that survives only there, either with a dub or not.
- In 2014, the site owners decided this user-generated content wasn't profitable enough.
- So they heavily redesigned everything, and decided to only promote partnered "content" instead (which sucks so bad that the small number of remaining users completely left).
What is happening to the videos?
- The owners recently declared all "unofficial" videos to be a copyright liability, so they will all be privated.
- Meaning that all unofficial videos (meaning ones uploaded by unofficial channels - channels not tagged with "AVT", "THE", or "PART") will only be accessible to their respective original uploaders.
- People protested, and the owners relented to keep unofficial videos available for a window of one month (starting from Jan 22).
What is to be done?
- Youtube-dl/yt-dlp used to support downloading individual Vbox7 videos before, but no longer seem to work - discussion regarding this on IRC. Downloading whole channels doesn't work either.
- There's also currently no way for youtube-dl (or some other crawler) to automatically distinguish between videos uploaded by unofficial channels (which are about to be lost in 1 month) and official channels (which are channels tagged with "AVT"/"THE"/"PART", and will remain available).
- In case distinguishing between official/unofficial channels is too complicated for a crawler (though I think it shouldn't be), perhaps the official videos might be proportionally small enough overall, so that it would be easier to just download them alongside everything else?
- And in case there's not enough time and/or space to download absolutely everything, I'm also not sure how to best prioritize videos - by likes/views + older videos first?
- Currently, unofficial videos can only be accessed with Bulgarian IP. Only official/partnered videos (which will remain on the site) can be watched from abroad. This further complicates things.
- Example of an official channel (the tags are visible after clicking the little dropdown menu on the left side):
- Example of an unofficial channel:
