C.E.R.T.O. / Modules / Web pages / YouTube

PLATFORM · YOUTUBE

YouTube

Comments and replies on videos and shorts, distinguished by level. Channel with every thumbnail at full quality. The film downloaded separately.

It switches itself on

You paste the address into the forensic browser.
You start a web page acquisition, as always.
C.E.R.T.O. recognises the platform and does the rest.

No option to tick, no separate module to buy, no extra cost: it is the Web pages module, at its own rate.

Under a YouTube video the comments run into the thousands and the replies sit behind a “view more replies” that must be opened one by one. No manual scrolling reaches the end, and a screenshot photographs the handful that was on screen at that moment.

YouTube offers an advantage the other platforms do not: the page carries its own service configuration. There is no need to intercept traffic or reload the page — the requests are composed while staying on the acquired page, which makes collection sturdier than elsewhere.

What goes into the bundle

What gets acquired

Only what the program actually does: every item matches a collection that exists in the code and has been tested on real acquisitions.

Comments and replies

On videos and shorts, distinguished by level: you can see which reply belongs to which comment. Text, author, date and like count come from the service.

Channel

Channel details and every content thumbnail at full quality, not the low-resolution ones the page displays.

The film

Downloaded separately as a standalone file with its own hash, playable with any player.

Recognised addresses

What you can paste

Recognition looks at the domain and the shape of the address. If it recognises nothing, it stays an ordinary web page acquisition: nothing is lost.

youtube.com/watch?v=<id>video with its comments
youtube.com/shorts/<id>short with its comments
youtu.be/<id>short form of the same video
youtube.com/@<canale>channel and content thumbnails

In the bundle

Where what it collects ends up

Folders inside the BagIt bundle, alongside everything else from the web acquisition: WACZ archive, screenshots, network traffic, certificates, report.

youtube-comments/
raw-api/

The bundle's interactive.html dashboard presents them in tables with search and sorting, and works offline, on a double click, even on a computer without C.E.R.T.O. installed.

The raw response stays in the bundle

Where collection goes through a service, every response is preserved verbatim with its provenance envelope: queried address, method, status, moment of receipt. Anyone contesting the data can go back to the source rather than trusting our table.

Sealed like every acquisition

A BagIt 1.0 bundle with an Ed25519 signature, a double RFC 3161 timestamp and a CASE/UCO description, verifiable by anyone, offline, with the included verifiers.

It says when it stops

The document reports how many items the platform announces, how many were collected and why collection stopped. A stated limit is worth more than an asserted completeness.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

The questions we are asked most often about this platform.

Are replies to comments acquired too?

Yes, and they stay distinguished by level: in the bundle you can see which reply belongs to which comment. It is the part no screenshot captures, because on the page it is hidden behind a “view more replies” that must be opened one by one.

Does it work on shorts too?

Yes. Shorts use a different service address from videos, and the collection accounts for it: a difference measured in the field, not assumed.

Is the video downloaded?

Yes, as a standalone file with its own cryptographic hash, alongside the page bundle. It cannot live inside the page archive because video streams travel under signed, expiring addresses that no archive can replay.