Video Archiving/Processing Tips and Tricks
Downloading Video Content
Almost everything out there in the end boils down to using the tool yt-dlp, whether calling it directly in a terminal (or powershell for windows users) or using a GUI wrapper around the utility. yt-dlp is an open source utility to download videos from youtube but has support for most big sites. I assume most users here are on windows or OS X, so I'll focus on GUI solutions and will also cover obtaining pesky media that yt-dlp doesn't want to acquire for you out of the box.
yt-dlp repository with installation instructions https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
Windows GUI option https://github.com/nickvisionapps/parabolic
Mac OS X GUI option https://github.com/kbss0000/ytdlp-gui
One challenge many users will face is that media can often be restricted to authenticated users. Don't worry about that until you run into it. If you do encounter this issue here's what's happening... think about a youtube video that is age restricted. You give the application the link to the video and then the application ventures to the page and requests the URI of the video and gets stuck because from the application's context, the request is not authenticated as a user of age. The answer is cookies! You can provide your browsers cookie files to these applications and from there they can bypass the authentication hurdle and access the restricted media. GUI applications *should* have options within them to do this as well but I'll need others to provide feedback as I've not used the GUIs myself. For yt-dlp it's as simple as adding "--cookies-from-browser firefox" (or chrome) to your command as needed or in your config file for permanent authentication.
The utility yt-dlp is written with youtube in mind first and has some generic media processing that will work on most sites such as Kick, Twitter or Odysee. However, some websites such as Rumble cannot be processed by the generic handling and so some extra steps need to be taken. You're going to have to get your hands a little dirty to get the right link. So, navigate to the page your media is playing from and press F12 on your keyboard to open up your browsers console. I'd recommend breaking it out into it's own window if you can find the button. Reload the page and then clip the "Network" tab. A search box will be at the top to filter network calls. Most often the media is relayed via an m3u8 link, a playlist file, so type "m3u8" into the search box and grab the first or second link when using rumble. Right click, copy, copy URL. Now give that link to yt-dlp or your GUI application and that should work!
I've tried it all but it doesn't work
see if the VideoDownloadHelper plugin for your browser will work? This sometimes will work on sites where I really struggle to figure out how to download media that is obfuscated by the website. https://v10.downloadhelper.net/
Processing Video Content (Converting / Clipping)
Again the majority of applications out there tend to use a single command line utility to process video, ffmpeg. Ffmpeg is an extremely powerful utility that can process audio and video and do pretty much anything that you need, but it can be very daunting for those who do not enjoy the command line. Again, GUI wrapper swoop in to save the day for the technically incapable. Personally I have a suite of bash scripts that automate the majority of my clipping workflow. However, when I have something that is very dense and I need more attention to detail when clipping I go with the application Shotcut. It's not pretty but it's simplistic and easy to get the hang of after you spend some time playing with it. I'll also link a few other more simplistic video processing applications here.
ffmpeg code repository with instructions for installation https://github.com/ffmpeg/ffmpeg
Shotcut - cross-platform video processing suite https://www.shotcut.org/
QWinFF - simplistic ffmpeg wrapper for Windows https://qwinff.github.io/
Handbrake - well known OS X video processor but is actually cross-platform https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake
Once you have an application installed you will need to spend some time learning the software to understand how to clip in it, I'm unfamiliar with everything but Shotcut but I'm a computer nerd so feel free to message me with questions about any of these applications and I can help you figure it out if you feel stuck.
Processing videos can be tricky as there are complicated things happening under the hood like keyframes, video and audio encoding options, etc. My first few months of clipping were trial and error and I produced a lot of clips that stuttered at the beginning due to not understanding keyframes while using ffmpeg. GUI applications largely handle this stuff for you automagically but if you find that you've rendered a video and the video stutters at the beginning or end of the clip then you're likely seeing an issue with keyframes, google it or message me for more info but ffmpeg has options to force the generation of keyframes or you can just fully re-encode it in x264 (a popular H.264 encoding that works on most devices) and it should fix the keyframes, which is what I do with all of my clips.
I recommend installing these two applications in addition to the above:
mpv - simple video player with a lot of support out of the box and a clean interface https://mpv.io/
joplin - note taking application that keeps your notes on your computer for privacy https://joplinapp.org/
MPV is a minimal, content focused video player (I hate VLC's UI). You can speed the video up by pressing ']' and slow it down by pressing '['. You can save a screenshot with 's', you can skip forward or back with arrow keys. I suggest watching content you intend to clip in mpv as you can easily get the millisecond timestamp for the clip by moving your mouse on the video until it shows the seek bar at the bottom and then you can click the timestamp and it will expand to show the milliseconds (the three numbers after the period).
I open a video in mpv, I ensure I can see the milliseconds so that I can cut stuff precisely and not have clips start in the middle of someone speaking, I increase the speed of the video to something like 1.7x and then I begin a list of my timestamps in joplin that include my filename and the start and ending timestamp. With my clipping workflow and my custom scripts I'm able to then just copy paste this into the command line and replace the ending of a constructed clipping command to run through all of them in a few minutes.
It's important to archive content because creators and platforms will remove content at the drop of a hat for seemingly no reason, I hope that this post is helpful to others and as I mentioned a few times my inbox is open to help others learn more so they can feel empowered to contribute more media rich posts here.