Who guards all this knowledge from decaying? Wikipedia is somewhat self-regulating, though the community of vigilant users occasionally stumbles in keeping the brainless zombies off (sneaky Left4Dead reference here). YouTube seems to be much more fragile. Everything goes, but just as well, probably, enything can get lost. I would be very much saddened if James Randi's videos were not around for viewing 10 or 20 years from now.
Of course, one way to help accomplish that is to download the videos locally and try to store them so they are still usable. I must therefore either include a free FLV (VP6) decoder (if there is such a thing), or recode them in some codec that seems to have decent chance of being still used decades from now. Theora is an obvious candidate, but I kind of doubt that it will stick around, since it's inferior in quality to just about any other modern codec - the users won't take to it.
Or I can trust that Google will recode the movies to new, more efficient codecs as they become available. Or that, really, Flash would live forever.
#1 Re: Does YouTube lose data? Does Google?
YouTube stores videos internally in H.264 format, so I wouldn't worry about that.
There is even a handy javascript bookmarklet to download .mp4 files directly.
#2 Re: Does YouTube lose data? Does Google?
I was wondering why the recent videos seem to be better quality than the old ones - they've switched to h.264! I don't know if they transcoded the old videos but the new ones really are MP4. I found the bookmarklet, thanks!