Tag: Youtube
Are Athletes Dying from the COVID Vaccine?
There is a nonsensical claim from anti-vaxxers that the COVID-19 vaccines are causing a massive increase in young athletes suddenly dropping dead from cardiac arrest.
Dr. Susan Oliver’s video debunking these claims is notable for what an excellent job it does debunking one of the primary sources for these claims (spoiler alert: most of the young athletes listed as dying from cardiac arrest were neither young nor died from cardiac arrest).
It is also notable for another odd reason–earlier this week, YouTube removed the video for spreading misinformation and gave Dr. Oliver’s account a community guideline strike.
The video was restored a couple of days later (presumably, the community guideline strike was removed), but this happens way too much on YouTube. Content spreading anti-vaccine misinformation remains widely available, while those debunking this nonsense are penalized by the company’s algorithm and brigading from bad-faith actors.
You Wouldn’t Emulate A Switch
Nintendo appears to be abusing the YouTube content ID system again to remove videos showing Switch and GameCube emulators running on the Steam Deck.
Saw this response on Reddit.
Downloading Age Restricted Videos With Youtube-DL
Recently I wanted to download a YouTube video using YouTube-DL, but received the following error message:
WARNING: Unable to download video info webpage: HTTP Error 410: Gone
ERROR: Sign in to confirm your age
This video may be inappropriate for some users.Although I disagree strongly with YouTube’s increasing habit of haphazardly applying age restrictions on videos, I still wanted a local copy of the video.
The solution is to pass a cookie to YouTube as part of the download process in YouTube-DL. I was able to accomplish that with the following steps.
- I installed the Get Cookies extension in Chrome. This extension allows users to export cookies for a site as a text file.
- I then visited YouTube.com, while I was logged in, and clicked on the Get
Cookies icon. Then I clicked on the “Export” button to download my YouTube cookies as a text file. - This created a youtube.com_cookies.txt file that I then copied into the YouTube-DL directory on my laptop.
- Finally I ran the following command in YouTube-DL to pass the cookie to YouTube and download the video:
youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mkv --all-subs --cookies youtube.com_cookies.txt [YouTube URL]Python Script to Download YouTube Comments Without the YouTube API
Egbert Bouman has a YouTube Comment Downloader script hosted on a Github repository that will download YouTube comments for a specific ID without using the YouTube API.
YouTube Removes Video from Donald Trump’s Channel
YouTube has announced it has removed a newly uploaded video from Donald Trump’s channel “for violating our policies.”