Video Star

How to unlock Video Star in Cheevos. Watch a video on YouTube and Cache logs it. Why the internet is bad at keeping video, and how Cache compensates. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You watched a video. Cache noted the category.

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube is nineteen seconds long. A man stands in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo and observes that they have very long trunks. It was posted in April 2005. Cache has it. Cache watches it sometimes, the way some people revisit a favorite painting.

Here is what haunts him. For every video that survives, hundreds vanish. Channels get deleted. Accounts get closed. Videos get taken down, lost to copyright claims, or quietly removed when a service shuts off. The internet feels permanent while you are looking at it and turns out to be made of sand.

So Cache keeps copies. Two hundred things from YouTube that no longer exist anywhere else. He is not trying to own them. He is trying to make sure they happened.

The turn: you thought you were just watching a video. You were also feeding a preservation project run by a raccoon who cannot stand the thought of anything disappearing. Every view is a small vote for the thing you watched to be remembered.

The catalog entry

YOUTUBE VISIT Acquired: Visited YouTube to watch a video. Condition: Buffered. Playing. Rarity: Common. But the Stash logs everything. Cache's Notes: Cache has archived the first YouTube video ever uploaded. He watches it sometimes. He has also archived 200 other things from YouTube that no longer exist. The internet is very bad at keeping things. Cache is compensating for this.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

Watch a video on YouTube.

  1. Go to youtube.com in your browser.
  2. Open any video and let it play.
  3. Cheevos logs the visit.

Video on the web streams to you in small chunks instead of downloading all at once, which is why a video starts playing before it has fully loaded. That buffering bar you sometimes see is the browser pulling the next chunks ahead of where you are watching. YouTube pioneered a lot of how this works.

Where it fits in the Stash

Media is one of the hardest things to preserve and one of the first to disappear, which is exactly why Cache guards it. Your video sits on the media shelf, logged and safe. To learn why a recycling-bin algorithm became an archivist, read the story.