"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.
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.
That’s a pretty penny on the bandwidth bill alone!
Ha, is it just me or does a “residential proxy network” sound like a fancy way of saying “botnet”?
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.