All my videos are mirrored on the Internet Archive (thanks to Amin Bandali)

2025-07-29

A few days ago, Amin Bandali contacted me about the prospect of mirroring my videos to the Internet Archive. The idea is to have the option of a video hosting platform that respects user freedom. I agreed and confirmed the free/libre copyleft terms I share all my publications under (GNU GPLv3+ for code, Creative Common BY-SA 4.0 for prose, GNU FDL for my technical manuals).

Amin has since done the work and documented it here: https://kelar.org/~bandali/2025/07/25/protesilaos-videos-archive.html. The publication also points to the Python script which performs the requisite operations. The script relies on the source code of my website to extract the relevant data. Amin describes the underlying technical considerations, given the large number of videos that needed to be downloaded from YouTube and uploaded to the Internet Archive.

On my part, I made a small change to the template of my website that produces the HTML output of entries with an embedded video. Those have links to the source on YouTube and, now, to the corresponding Internet Archive page. For example, my latest “Prot Asks” video with Ihor, the Emacs Org mode maintainer, is available here: https://archive.org/details/prot-codelog-2025-07-26-prot-asks-ihor-emacs-org-maintainer-history-travel-material-science/.

These “raw links”, as opposed to the embedded frame, are also helpful for users who receive my publications via RSS/Atom feeds (and I do share the entire blog post, by the way, rather than an excerpt because that is the most convenient way to read RSS).

Thanks to Amin for this initiative!