a TorrentFreak article got me spooked so I fired up the ol' yt-dlp. Got the entire channel, including comments, description metadata, and thumbnail images.
A significant number of videos were actually unavailable because of an odd YouTube bug where 15+ year old videos were listed as "currently being processed". I may re-run this later (since I ran it in archive file mode) to get the missing videos, as it seems there may be about 300 out of 4911 videos missing.
Nice!
Could you fell us what tool you used to also get the description text and the comments? With dlp i only found the option of downloading the video itself.
yt-dlp does support fetching comments and description text - if you use the
--write-info-jsonand--write-commentsoptions, it will save them as a JSON file alongside other video metadata.I think I do have the subs tag in my default config, but almost none of their videos have any.
Is this the procedure you used?
https://superuser.com/questions/1752396/how-to-download-all-videos-with-yt-dlp-from-a-youtube-channel-after-the-redesign
Pretty much. You can either point it at the channel OR use a link to their Videos playlist (the playlist you get when hitting "play all"). I usually use the playlist to be consistent.