@dawn: I will do that. Especially since I can now kill two birds with one stone – prevent Youtube rot and ensure better accessibility of this website. :)

Doesn’t matter. I hope you take your own advice and don’t forget to provide short descriptions of videos you post in the future. It’s really a joy to see that someone has done that when you don’t have flash installed (or enabled) or you’ve reached their site with a text-based browser.

@dawn: Sssh! Don’t tell them. You are going to expose my clever ploy to trick people into running accessible blogs!

:P

But yeah – you are right. Accessibility is sadly still only a rare afterthought for most of us. I mean, let’s face it – how many websites have descriptive alt tags for their images?

Most people ignore the alt attribute. Those who don’t can usually be grouped like this:

1. People who include alt tags only to pass the validation – they usually just type whatever in there
2. People who use them to add clever roll-over remarks to their images (the way XKCD does it)
3. People who genuinely care about accessibility

It’s sad, but I didn’t even think about accessibility when I was writing this. It never even crossed my mind.

It’s funny how your proposal is actually a basic principle of web accessibility. Will problems like disappearing videos and images make people unknowingly follow accessibility guidelines?

@IceBrain: Yeah, contrary to popular belief there are some valuable pages there.

They almost closed down File Front as well – but I think it was bought out the last minute. If they closed it down we would pretty much lose close to 48TB of game mods and other gaming materials.

I think the main problem is that people don’t consider the future of their blog/profile. Who considers the fact that posts will be read two or three years from now? Most of the blogs I now don’t even last that much.

As someone said, this may be considered a “dark” century in the future, as a great deal of information is lost and discarded.
All the data in Geocities, for example, will disappear in a little while, as Yahoo is prepared to pull the plug. The folks at Archive.org are working fast to backup most of it, but I’m sure that many websites full of interesting stuff will disappear, along with thousands of blinky texts and “under construction” gifs.

@Chris Wellons: Actually, images are as susceptible as anything. In the past I’ve seen artists and photographers go ballistic when they found out someone posted their “masterpiece” on their website. These were pretty much the same type of people who would have that stupid script blocking right click on their gallery page. :P

Mini rant: WTF is the deal with the “photographers” who post their work “portfolio” in a flash driven gallery with 240×320 sized pictures. What is the point of that?

The thing is that most people don’t care if you re-post their image. Videos on the other hand – yeah, you could get in trouble.

@Mart: Yup, the copyright removal thing is broken. As far as I know there is virtually no verification of any kind. If they get a request, they nuke the video and if the uploader contests it they may or may not bring it back.

They also seem to have some sort of auto-detection script that does pattern matching on newly uploaded videos. My brother made a “end of semester” music vid featuring clips of him and his friends taken at parties at at school set to the “It’s the end of the world as we know it” song. It got rejected and deleted before it went public. So either he was extremely unlucky and fell a victim to a manual spot-check conducted by some low wage drone, or it’s was a script.

How about hosting your own videos? I’ve heard of the JW FLV Player and there’s a WP plugin catering to that too (WP-FLV). Of course, the biggest downside to this is that you will have to bear your own hosting and bandwidth fees.

I think the reason for YouTube rot is that the web is too juiced up on quick bites. If a recently uploaded video goes viral, it will make waves around the world for a while, until it gets forgotten because the next viral video gets uploaded. And the unending cycle continues.

I’m not sure how’s the process to claim a copyright infringement on YT, but it looks freaking easy to me. Anyone who’s anybody can claim that a particular video is infringing some obscure copyright law. And YT, in its infinite wisdom, seems take it down immediately.

The solution I have is simply to download videos from file sharing websites that I like (usually some sports or comedy thing), occupying a special place on my HDD.

When I saw the title I was about to comment how your archives are full of dead, rotted Youtube videos, but I see you did that for me! Locally hosting videos could be a viable solution if it weren’t for copyright. If you download that Youtube video and host that locally, you could be in for some trouble. Images don’t seem to be as susceptible to this.

Your proposal is some great advice, the kind that’s only obvious in hindsight. If the video has any popularity it’s likely to be found elsewhere given some meta information. If not, the post still has something to say. Post’s with “Hey check this out: <embed>” rot along with their videos.

The Firefox video tag support is exciting. Perhaps once it’s established Theora and Vorbis on the web will really pick up and we can start dumping Flash video. Other browsers adding support for Theora should be pretty simple thanks to ogg’s liberal BSD license. Naturally, IE will never support it without a special plugin. Or it will support MSTheora, which happens to only work with IE.

Unfortunately, The Firefox ogg support was announced almost a year ago, so it may yet be awhile.

Yeah, it would be nice but it just doesn’t work in practice – at least not for mpg files.

The sad part about digital video is that the file extension only tells you half the story – it tells you about the wrapper format. You still need to know how the actual video stream is encoded. So you can have two mpg files, both requiring different software.

Implementing a video player in a browser in a cross platform fashion is a nightmare.

That said HTML5 draft originally included native support for Ogg Theora video trying to get some sort of uniform baseline for online video. Sadly it was dropped due to strong opposition from Apple and Nokia.

Oh, and Firefox 3.1 Beta does support native Oog playback. :)