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  • Hacker News
  • Curious how useful very large video datasets are compared with smaller, better curated ones.

    At some point, adding more videos probably helps less than improving the quality of the data.

    by techsage
  • - can someone with expertise give us an overview of the architecture involved doing this

    - let us say you ran yt-dlp inside python aiohttp

    - surely your ll run a limit soon as your ip address will be flagged

    - what solutions do we have to auto rotate proxies in python

    - are there better, faster and more reliable ways to go about downloading a 100 million videos without getting your ip address blocked?

    by vivzkestrel
  • Google may supply cache boxes to ISPs which can be manipulated to let download any video you want
    by faangguyindia
  • Use Tor to proxy. Every time you get a connection error, send a SIGHUP to the Tor daemon, which will tell the Tor daemon to establish a new connection, thereby giving you a new IP. You may not get as good results as a residential proxy, but these proxies are prohibitively expensive if you're doing this for your own personal or academic use, and the Tor method works surprisingly well.
    by earthnail
  • Damn, that's a lot of videos for them to contact the creators and ask for permission to use their content as machine learning training content. Unless of course, they didn't, and just went ahead with it anyway...
    by voidUpdate
  • Under the EU's AI Act non-profits and universities can just bypass these constents to make non-commercial datasets btw
    by lucrbvi
  • "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.

    by topwalktown
  • I was wondering if youtube blocked them a lot and they got a lot of videos from other sources - but no, you can see on this HF page that 93.1% of URls are youtube.com, https://huggingface.co/datasets/laion/BVD-URLs
    by ks2048
  • 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.

    by ks2048