"Overall, we attempted to download 130M videos and achieved a link success rate of approximately 60%, resulting in 80M successfully retrieved videos with a total duration of 10M hours."

I am astonished that the success rate is so high. How Youtube didn't block them, I don't know. But I think that this URL list won't age well because youtube will very quickly block any researcher trying to download these videos themselves.

• ks2048

  today at 4:12 AM

  I believe they have the actual videos to download, "exclusively for academic and non-commercial research." and you have to request access, https://projects.laion.ai/bvd/bvd-raw-access.html

  They say they used yt-dlp and "employ a residential proxy network". But, yeah, youtube seems to now more aggressively block yt-dlp.

  • kevmo314

    today at 5:03 AM

    That’s a pretty penny on the bandwidth bill alone!

  • kennyadam

    today at 5:14 AM

    Ha, is it just me or does a “residential proxy network” sound like a fancy way of saying “botnet”?

    • m00dy

      today at 5:36 AM

      Nope, they’re different things. Proxy networks like Proxybase [0] use an open-source clients and ask for the user’s consent before allowing them to join the network.

      [0] https://proxybase.xyz