Old youtube videos decomposing
Lately ive seen tons of 2008-2012 videos dont work anymore even tho they used to work perfectly especially (on this channel) youtube.com/user/nsrrenard even tho these vids worked perfectly fine before circa 2023 now they dont work anymore for some reason and these is happening with a lot of videos especially old ones and these vids werent low watched either some had over a million views too
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Data is expensive to store. They move "dead" videos to a deep archive server and might keep the low res version. They made a blog post not that long ago about it.
Could you link to the blog post? I am aware of the YouTube tiered storage system (very obvious loading time for ancient videos), but are they downgrading videos??
I found this post - could be somewhat related? Folks are also claiming old videos are being downgraded https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1o6t6yy/youtube_either_by_human_error_or_otherwise_seems/
did they officially say anything about this? there were some observations by outsiders but i don't think they said anything.
I don't have any proof of this, but my feeling is that they keep transcoding videos over the years when better and better codecs get developed.
Like-take the very first years of youtube. Those videos were probably huge compared to today. I bet super old videos on youtube have been transcoded like 5 times by now.
Anyone have other examples of this?
A lot of early Neil Cicierega vids are corrupted in some way
I'm not sure if it's a related failure mode but this video and this video both from 2016 became corrupted in a way that they're still playable even to this day but they're clearly not right. The first vid is corrupted on playback for me in a very obvious way (everything is pixelated grey), whereas the second vid actually plays correctly for me but the preview when I scrub shows the corruption. Fortunately, the channel owner re-uploaded them (first vid, second vid). I wonder if it was due to the fact that it's a rendered animation and maybe used some sort of weird format/codec but I'm really just spitballing. Interesting that it happened to two of his videos though and 2016 isn't even that old in the grand scheme of YouTube.
As mentioned, there will be videos stuck in processing limbo and will be stuck like that for the remainder of the page/YT existence.
In some cases, like this user content was scraped by the wayback machine, which you can play if it was captured without issue. I did find that you have to be quick on the draw with the play button as a pop up comes up and makes the page unusable.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130601000000*/https://www.youtube.com/user/nsrrenard
You can C+P and link from YT and see if it exists in working order. The CDNow CEO video was not captured in time and remains lost.
edit: It does take time for the content to load on Waybackmachine.
What exactly are you implying. The videos are disappearing, or they appear on the page but won’t play?
I tried clicking some of them and YouTube gives a "We're processing this video. Check back later." message.
I just checked and can confirm the “processing” message, something’s going on.
There was a post about this on DataHoarders a few months ago
https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1o6t6yy/youtube_either_by_human_error_or_otherwise_seems/
Just checked this video again and it are still "processing"
And this video: LindaAI-CUE - さいたま2000 (SAITAMA 2000)
Has comments from people asking why it is still processing... from over a year ago. Any video with this bug will never finish "processing"
maybe they're re-encoding to a lower bitrate or something..
My old videos play back in a stuttering choppy way