Invidious: Legacy annotation support

[Discookie]

Before 2017, YouTube allowed creating annotations on top of videos. Some older videos still utilize these.

Example: https://invidio.us/watch?v=8VaFE6RU4bI

[omarroth]

I think this is a duplicate of #45. There is no way that I know of to display them without using the official YouTube player. If I find any way to do this I will provide an update here.

[Discookie]

Does https://www.youtube.com/annotations_invideo?video_id= do this?
Seems to work for the example.

[omarroth]

Thank you! That is very useful. The main issue is with displaying them. For VideoJS, there does not seem to be a plugin that is capable of displaying annotations the same way as YouTube.

[Zero3K]

I found two plugins that might work:

https://github.com/contently/videojs-annotation-comments
https://github.com/brightcove/videojs-overlay

[omarroth]

Ooh, I like how videojs-annotation-comments. I'd like to hear thoughts on how YouTube's annotations could be improved.

[elypter]

my first thought when looking at this was that it could be used to mark sponsoring or ads that are included in the video and potentially automatically skip them.

[omarroth]

YouTube announced that they will be deleting all legacy annotations on January 15th, 2019. I just announced a project to archive them, and expect to add support for them in the API and player.

Any help is appreciated!

[elypter]

thanks for doing this. it's really a shame that they are removing millions of man hours just so they can make the expierience worse.

[glmdgrielson]

If need be, I can get you a few comparison images/videos so that it's easier to recreate.

[omarroth]

I've actually done some work making recordings with annotations already, namely this video, which seems pretty comprehensive. If there's any videos that use some features that aren't included or you think would help, please do record them!

[glmdgrielson]

Ah. I was going to say that one of the channels I asked for is currently doing reuploads and I have a couple of screenshots that may be usable as references for how they should look. Do we have a recording of that one that won't break on the 15th?

[omarroth]

YouTube deleted all annotations around 15:00 UTC as expected. An estimated 1.4 billion videos have been archived, and I'm working through everything right now to make it suitable for Invidious and other projects to use.

There's a list of videos available here. If anyone has backups that aren't in the list I would love to have them!

[elypter]

in case you are not already in contact with them there were 2 other people archiving metadata https://www.reddit.com/r/Archiveteam/comments/afjkk4/hey_archiveteam_got_those_youtube_annotation_xml/edziryc/

[omarroth]

I tried to get in touch with them a month or so ago when we started archiving but unfortunately never received a response. I think they plan on publishing what they have around late January/early February, so I'll plan on adding anything from their project.

[elypter]

btw, since this project is now completed is there a way to download the data for the sake of a backup?

[omarroth]

Expect to see an announcement in the next couple days with links to compressed data dumps on the Internet Archive, which I expect will be what you want to use for a backup. There should be a torrent link as well when it is available.

[dimqua]

An estimated 1.4 billion videos have been archived

Do you know how many YouTube videos have annotations?

[omarroth]

Added with #303 :tada:.