from Hacker News

Show HN: I collected 1700 YouTube links to relive 20 years of men's Grand Slams

by jackjackk0 on 8/30/21, 9:45 PM with 1 comments

• by jackjackk0 on 8/30/21, 9:45 PM

  As a tennis enthusiast who only recently got interested in the TV pro tour competitions, I wanted to catch up on the historic efforts of the Big 3 (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic) in the last two decades of Grand Slams. Instead of manually searching on YouTube for each match, with high spoilers risks and possible poor results to navigate through, I thought: why not automatize the whole thing? A weekend of Python later, here I am.

  Although it's nothing fancy, I'm sharing the outcome in case any other tennis enthusiasts might find it useful. One interesting experience for me was filtering the noise across the available Youtube videos. For example, I discovered a whole genre of (worthless to this project) videos of video-game matches with identical titles to legit videos of past matches. So I started blacklisting channels when coming across poorly rated videos, but then some videos of official channels were being blacklisted, so had to introduce whitelisting as well... For minimizing spoilers, I'm redacting titles and removing players names, but then aliases (e.g. Rafa) or channel names (e.g. RogerTV or Djoker Nole) might give it away, something to be improved upon.

  In any case, hope you like it, and feel free to provide feedback to make this collection more useful!