Issues capturing YouTube user's videos

August 13, 2020 14:19

Hello,

We've been trying to capture various institutional YouTube channels since March or so, following the instructions for YouTube crawls here. That said, we keep getting the issue where it seems to capture all the content (indicated by a high data count and testing that the captured videos are as expected), but when you click on videos from the channel page, we get a "Not in Archive" error. The URL is always formatted like: https://accounts.google.com/watch?v=vAMYVdjVp4M, and everything after "watch?" matches the original YouTube URL. (Very occasionally, it won't result in a "Not in Archive" error, but take you to a totally blank page.)

We tried scoping in the accounts.google.com page, and while this resulted in a sort of wire-frame version of the YouTube watch page being captured, the video is still not being played back. We also have the seed formatted automatically as a YouTube video, so it should have the recommended settings already.

Does anyone know what might be happening here? Our hospital published a lot of COVID-19 information on YouTube, so this is a critical piece of our collection this year.

Thanks!

Stefana Breitwieser

Arthur Aufses, Jr., MD Archives

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

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5 comments

Karl Blumenthal August 18, 2020 18:33

Hi, Stefana. Apologies for the inconvenience here, but the good news is that you are doing everything correctly to collect and preserve the intended videos in the meantime. We are working actively here on our side to reconfigure the Wayback replay software to link to the proper and archived URL upon browsing, like this one for your example above, and to restore the "watch" page contents that accompany each video. Those videos are still accessible by way of the lightbox player linked in the Wayback banner message, so please do let us know if you see anything to the contrary there.

I'm updating Archive-It's system status page to track progress on this front, but I will report back here directly when we have an update or better yet a fix to review.

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Stefana Breitwieser August 19, 2020 15:37

Hi Karl -- thanks so much for this! It's really helpful. I'm seeing the lightbox player on the one you link to, but not my own crawl -- I'm guessing it's because I haven't saved it yet? (Just want to be completely sure before saving these large crawls.) Thanks again!

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Karl Blumenthal August 24, 2020 17:58

Curiouser and curiouser! :-) I got my link above from what I believe to be your latest test crawl, so if you have a specific example of another "watch page" where you do not see the lightbox video, then please submit us a ticket and we'll take look into it directly.

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Stefana Breitwieser August 26, 2020 15:22

Thanks Karl! Even for the same video for the same test, when I navigate to it on Wayback, I have a slightly different URL than the one you link to above and the lightbox isn't appearing. Just submitted a ticket! :)

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Tatiana Swann August 28, 2020 14:38 (Edited August 28, 2020 14:39)

We have been having the same issues with YouTube the link changes from the wayback page twice before showing the "accounts.google" Stefana mentioned. The videos do not load correctly and in general are the same issues mentioned above.

Tatiana M. Swann

Archives Technician

Smithsonian Institution Archives

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