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Save your old YouTube annotations!

Tool

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I've tweeted about the tool to Jason Scott (textfiles) who works at the Internet Archive (archive.org), and he retweeted to all his followers. I'm hoping it will hang in there for a bit. Getting this kind of stuff backed up (and often reporting on it) is their specialty.
A shame to see YouTube history like annotations just be wiped off of the site after so long, but god I'm glad to see stuff like this where steps are being taken to preserve them in at least some form. Great work, WYE. Not at all what I expected to see from you of all people, but great nonetheless.
https://waxy.org/2018/11/a-tribute-to-youtube-annotations/

Kaizo Trap is among those that will be broken by removal of annotations. Are subtitles even linkable, or does it just function as closed captioning?
I will never understand websites wiping out their own history for literally arbitrary reasons.

But as always, WYE is the man of the useful utility tools. Pretty wise idea to convert them into annotations, for at least saving and keeping track of them in the first place. I don't have many annotations on my YouTube channels but definitely will be useful for channels like SomeGuy's.

I think you could add playlist support for allowing converting more than one video at once. With that SomeGuy, for example, could run though his 1,000 videos directly.... However I suppose you would need to be careful with that to not overload your backend with too many requests, haha.

Nice job!
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Oh, this is actually much more useful than some other method I came across a few weeks ago (basically, saving the annotations XML to a file, then copying that on some converter that parses XML to get the SRT, which in itself was kinda buggy). On top of that, that converter lacked merging two annotations that overlap into one, which your tool handles just fine...so thanks for that.
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Just to let you guys know, I've updated the tool (same link as before).

This adds support for annotations with text that shows up when you hover over them (like this, which I stumbled across in a help thread). Information about the position on screen (which is probably important for this type of annotation) are lost, but that's how things are.

Let me know if I broke anything!


 
Hell, if I had stuck with my original Youtube channel I had made in 2011 before they started transitioning away from annotations, I definitely would have found this super useful!
But since I made this one so recently, I have no need for it. Great work, guy!#thp{=D}
                                                                                                                  
                              
I just found an issue. It seems the annotation converter doesn't recognize speech bubbles, and when I tried to convert the annotations on this video...
Touhou 9 - Where's My Spell Gauge Boost?
...it told me no annotations were found in the video. However, there are indeed annotations in that video, but they're all in speech bubble form.

I hope I didn't miss out on any important speech bubble annotations on the videos that I've already converted the annotations into text files on.
Originally posted by SomeGuy712x
I just found an issue. It seems the annotation converter doesn't recognize speech bubbles, and when I tried to convert the annotations on this video...
Touhou 9 - Where's My Spell Gauge Boost?
...it told me no annotations were found in the video. However, there are indeed annotations in that video, but they're all in speech bubble form.

Alright, thanks for bringing that up! I quickly added a fix, so speech bubble annotations should be suppported now.

I'm really really sorry that this may have made you miss some annotations! #tb{D:} Let's just hope there weren't a lot.


 
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Tool