[GNU-linux-libre] Why archive.org treats us all better than YouTube, Vimeo, and other A/V hosters

[J.B. Nicholson]

bill-auger wrote:
> that statement alone is enough to make a purist cringe - it just goes to
> show that people who use youtube do not have very much concern for
> quality, neither producers nor consumers

I concur; archive.org even lets you automatically identify which of the 
files in an upload is the original (the data archive.org received) and 
which files are archive.org-made derivatives. archive.org makes an XML file 
identifying the original and the derivatives called <itemname>_files.xml.



Consider the item at https://archive.org/download/Sita_Sings_the_Blues/ 
(Nina Paley's movie "Sita Sings the Blues") for example:

- 
https://archive.org/download/Sita_Sings_the_Blues/Sita_Sings_the_Blues_files.xml 
is a list of all the files uploaded or generated for this item. I can 
easily identify the derivative files (the source attribute is set to 
"derivative") from the files uploaded (source="original") just by reading 
the markup. I'm not aware of another gratis hosting service that has this 
feature.

- 
https://archive.org/download/Sita_Sings_the_Blues/Sita_Sings_the_Blues_meta.xml 
is the metadata for this item. From this I can learn a great deal about the 
upload. I'm not aware of another gratis hosting service that has this feature.

- 
https://archive.org/download/Sita_Sings_the_Blues/Sita_Sings_the_Blues_reviews.xml 
is a machine-parseable version of the discussion posts for this item. I'm 
not aware of another gratis hosting service that has this feature.



Here are some more advantages to archive.org:

archive.org offers BitTorrent downloading for every item. I imagine they 
offer a webseed for each torrent. This probably doesn't really pay off for 
archive.org until someone uploads a very popular item, but it's nice of 
them to do. I'm not aware of another gratis hosting service that has this 
feature.

https://blog.archive.org/2011/03/31/how-archive-org-items-are-structured/ 
has documentation on how archive.org items are structured. Always give 
people the /download/<itemname> URL and let archive.org redirect the 
requester to wherever the item is located at that time. Never bookmark or 
link to the machine-specific URL because that could break.

archive.org knows how to serve up parts of items to visitors -- zip 
archives, for instance, can be looked inside of and data within the zip 
file served to visitors separately.

archive.org hosts a playable archive of video game ROMs with an emulator.

There's no YouTube equivalent to any of the above. Google apparently isn't 
interested in making it easy for users to integrate YouTube-hosted data 
into other endeavors in a way that isn't ultimately controlled by YouTube. 
YouTube wants you to push their nonfree JS onto your users. That's no way 
to treat your users. The same can be said for many other hosters that offer 
similar limitations (A/V-only, JS-required for typical use, 
censorship-riddled, built to be non-integrative in a freedom-respecting 
way) such as Vimeo.

archive.org simply treats you and your audience better.