I'm a fan of the metadata files that you can collect with yt-dlp, especially comments, very nice to have when preserving volatile channels. So I had an AI python script made which can convert all of the metadata it creates into a functional HTML file with CSS and Javascript. It works on an entire directory of files.
Preview Image: https://ibb.co/0RbqMt1f
The best feature is probably sorting up to hundreds of thousands of comments (at once) by Longest length, Most likes, Most replies, or alphabetically. I couldn't manage to implement chronological sorting though, maybe it's possible but comment timestamps didn't help. Also it can't play video files; doesn't seem possible with static HTML in this context.
Pastebin Script Link: https://pastebin.com/L7supm6m
Script download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FYYIZMkjNzMWEnKcTAeiLYiErJU1cSiz
Example HTML : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xdhNIBfQiTdviSTzhEbWCZywVk8r4qvC
I'm not going to say this is an advanced thing but I think it looks good for what it is, it took several hours to get functioning/looking the way I wanted, debug, test new stuff. If you wanted you could probably redesign it to look more like the old youtube layout, but it'd take awhile probably, AI can't really one shot it.
Currently it can display basically everything in a fake youtube page with a functioning description and comment section. As well as several buttons to copy metadata, and a few links and tooltips for relevant stuff.
I think this is most useful for archiving videos/channels that could get deleted, I do this proactively with certain channels. So for every video you archive, you could have an HTML file with it to search comments. From what I can tell the HTML files can open directly from Internet Archive, and render it's own page.
The Wayback Machine doesn't have functional comment sections, or archives any comments at all, so this at least is superior in that aspect. Of course, it depends on the day you archive the comments.
Features
- Visual representation of a possibly deleted video. Title, description, thumbnail (if the video isn't deleted), comments, tons of other info. I tried to get it to play video files/thumbnails in the HTML after its opened, pretty sure its not possible. If the video is deleted, thumbnails won't render because google links are deleted.
- All comments can be rendered, chronological sorting isn't possible but you can sort by Most Likes, Most Replies, Longest Length, Alphabetically. (This itself could be really interesting on its own to search comment sections). I got all comments on "Stronger" by Kanye to load at once, took a few minutes for 100K comments.
- Copy channel URL or Channel Handle of the video creator, or any commenter. Clicking a commenter profile picture opens it in a new tab, 64x64 resolution, it looks like a channel thumbnail downloader finds higher quality links though.
- FakeTube logo, Open the original video link in new tab, and links to beginner-oriented archive tutorial documents I've made (+ other scripts). If you don't want the links there, you could just remove the "tutorial-links-container" and CSS styling.
- A button to open the original script in a pastebin link.
- Additional info section that has things like tags, video length, format, and bitrate.
- Schedule date of some videos (90% sure that's what timestamp refers to), functional description, buttons with hover effects.
- Functional dislike bar with % ratio tooltip (only if the json file is pre-2022). Very niche application but it works.
- Verified checkmarks, favorited comments, pinned comments (display "Pinned" rather than at the top of the comments).
I tried getting comments sorted by Newest, but certain jsons files had the exact same timestamp for each comment, while others didn't and you could sort of sort them by date. But no matter what, the exact timestamp (UTC 00:00:00) would be the same for each comment. This is most noticeable in replies, they had to be sorted by most likes which kinda sucks. There is a "time_text" on comments like what youtube has, which is relative to the json creation date, but it's not precise.
Also I couldn't find an uploader profile picture link, unless the uploader made a comment on their own video; if not it displays as "N/A". Commenter profile pictures work just fine though unless they change them. It does rely on google links for images, so if the links are deprecated they won't show up. Couldn't find a way around this.
If something is glitchy, or there's a missed opportunity, I'm open to suggestions. I'm by no means a yt-dlp expert
