Hello. 1st time caller, long time lurker. If I wanted to get a bunch of music videos for a theme party (in this case goth 80s) what would be the best source? Are there like mtv torrents by year or anything to make the collecting less tedious?
We thank you for your support.
I was doing something like this, using FakeTV and Plex/Jellyfin, and uh, sadly, the answer I came up with was that no, there’s not.
I ended up combining a number of private torrents, usenet downloads, and a LOT of YouTube downloads into a Fake-MTV stream.
The good news, at least, is that if you’re wanting anything remotely interesting to more than 3 people ever, someone has put the music videos on YouTube and thus those are easy to find. The channel announcements and news segments and other stuff that made MTV actually MTV was a lot harder, lol.
Ok, I can work with harvesting YT but what do you use to do it? There are multiple websites that CLAIM to do this but they all are sketch.
yt-dlp is my go to. It’s the open source project most other things use behind the scenes
ytDownloader, assuming it still works.
You have to find the links by hand, but wasn’t really that bad for what I was doing, since I really only needed to snag about 50 videos or so to make the playlist rotation work out right.
Find a playlist of the music videos you want, use jdownloader to download the entire playlist.
Did you look at the internet archive?
Yeah, there is/was like a 1tb archive of various recordings that I used to fish out bits and pieces from.
…I then noticed that the quality was awful on a lot of that because it’s almost certainly coming off 20 year old VHS tapes and being recorded in some combination of resolution and bitrate that could at best be considered ‘low’ and fell down the “AI” upscaling rabbit hole.
In case anyone wasn’t aware, you can do a shocking amount of amazing upscaling shit for the low low investment of a GPU and a ton of power. (I used QualityScaler)