The Great Twitch Purge of Three Weeks From Now

[theinternetftw]

So, perhaps due to an incoming Google acquisition, disturbing things are afoot at Twitch Interactive.  Justin.tv was completely shut down with all videos and accounts deleted.  Twitch VODs will now be auto-muted if they match Audible Magic's audio fingerprinting.  And in three weeks all old VODs will be deleted, with only highlights shorter than two hours in length being saved. (edit: the highlight time limit has been removed, thus saving things as highlights looks to be the easiest way to fix this) (Relevant Twitch Blog Links: here, and here)

 

Twitch hopefully just ceded major ground to whoever refuses to impose these limits.

 

But what this means for twitch.tv/idlethumbs is that many cool videos are going to be deleted relatively soon, unless they're exported to youtube by the Thumbs, turned into highlights by the Thumbs, or publicly archived for posterity by the readers.

 

Things on the chopping block include:

 

"Special" Streams:

 

* The Post-Kickstarter Stream

* Video of the Ruinationcast

* Bioshock with JP

* Bioshock Demake with JP

* DayZ with Evan Lahti

* X-Com with JP and Evan Lahti

* LucasArts Memories

 

"Regular" Streams:

 

* Tennnes

* Stream of the old Minecraft server

* Pikmin 2

* Maybe some of the Crusader Kings II saga? (there's so much of it, it's hard to tell if it all got exported to youtube)

* Foiled

* The Yawhg

* Super Pole Riders

* A lot of Dota

* A good bit of DayZ

* A soul-crushing amount of Spelunky

 

I think that's everything not highlighted or on youtube.  Did I miss anything?  If somehow worst comes to worst and nobody particularly cares about this stuff (I would be astonished), I'll be using this list to grab all of the above and put torrents up if no better plan to save the content materializes (read: any plan other than this one, as my upload is ~30kbs).

[mikemariano]

Save Nick playing Solitaire!  It's on YouTube but double-check that it's the whole stream.

[Enshi]

Thought about this as well, most are on youtube i believe, but grabbing them just in case as well.

[Moom]

I am fairly certain that all of the Crusader Kings II Saga has been uploaded to their youtube channel however, backups never hurt nobody.

[James]

I hope someone saves the Ruinationcast, in case I ever want to go back and see them getting distracted and not really addressing my question.

[theinternetftw]

An update: highlights policy has been changed in response to the backlash. No more time limit.  So saving the videos (from the Thumbs' perspective) would now involve just making highlights out of all the VODs that you want to save.

 

(edit: changed list to reflect this)

[James]

That's good, but I think this is still a pretty good prompt to make some sort of backup of anything you'd really hate to lose. Maybe next time there won't be so much warning. It sounds like the Justin.tv thing came and went pretty much unnoticed.

[theinternetftw]

To aid others who might be backing things up, here are the URLs to all the archived streams to date (should work with youtube-dl):

http://pastebin.com/tS8naZVX

 

And here's another file with the video names attached to let you pick through the URLs and grab what you want:

 

http://pastebin.com/3BWvFKfs

 

A quick stat or two:

 

There are currently 135 archived streams. 70 of those don't involve Spelunky.

There are currently 89 highlights (videos that will actually be saved).  40 of those don't involve Spelunky.

 

Total running time: 131:47:18  (I estimated removing Spelunky runs would take off about 35 hours, and I was pretty close: 99:26:33 sans-Spelunky)

 

Total space required to backup archive (at 800MB per 30 min chunk): 211GB  (160GB sans-Spelunky)

[mikemariano]

If you have the bandwidth, you can help Archive Team back up as many Twitch videos as possible.

 

http://tracker.archiveteam.org/twitchtv/

 

You can download a virtual machine which will automatically start downloading FLV files from Twitch, then uploading them to disk space provided by the Internet Archive.  I'm doing it right now and discovering that there are a huge number of popular Twitch users whose saved streams are all 800MB+.  Crazy!

[sclpls]

It will be a sad day if we lose the Far Cry 2 stream. Not that the chat is archived, but it was amazing seeing so many people who were like, "oh, this is why you guys love Far Cry 2!" because they saw how rad the game is once you start really fucking with its systems.

[James]

If you have the bandwidth, you can help Archive Team back up as many Twitch videos as possible.

 

http://tracker.archiveteam.org/twitchtv/

 

You can download a virtual machine which will automatically start downloading FLV files from Twitch, then uploading them to disk space provided by the Internet Archive.  I'm doing it right now and discovering that there are a huge number of popular Twitch users whose saved streams are all 800MB+.  Crazy!

I have plenty of bandwidth, but not that much free disk space at the moment. How much does it need to work with?

[toblix]

68GB

[mikemariano]

I have plenty of bandwidth, but not that much free disk space at the moment. How much does it need to work with?

 

I'm not sure.  I have only ever had two concurrent downloads at a time, so that has been under 2 GB at any one time.

[theinternetftw]

Archive Team is being pretty targeted with their grabs, at least for the moment.  You can find what they're grabbing here along with a ton of other info:

 

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Twitch.tv

 

Idlethumbs content isn't anywhere on those lists, though everything except ~5 videos or so seven videos exactly, listed below, should be grabbed if they make it to archiving everything with >100 views.

 

edit: There are 7 idlethumbs videos with <100 views.  They fall into a few categories:

 

1) Content-less snippets involving stream restarts, audio problems, etc.  Things in that category:

 

http://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/b/431128999

http://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/b/489368207

http://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/b/487610714

 

2) A few short Spelunky runs.

 

http://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/b/485065689

http://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/b/487842398

http://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/b/489097176

 

3) This.  Which defies categorization and is kind of great.

 

http://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/b/430028262