Bevibel Design
Line Rider and Theater Design/Tech
[Click Here to Browse the Archives]
Archival Sub-Projects
Archival Release Series
Collections of previously unreleased Line Rider material, often via recovered files from old creators.
IRTLTube Restoration Project
Line Rider videos that have been taken off YouTube, blocked, or muted for various reasons get reuploaded here.
Line Rider Recovery Projects
Sometimes entire Line Rider YouTube channels get deleted, or all their videos are taken down. Many of those videos get reuploaded into playlists here.
Contest Recap Video Records
Video records documenting Line Rider Tournaments, Movie of the Week Contests, and Line Art of the Week Contests get uploaded here.
Process
Time spent assembling the official archive: ~1400 hours of work over 18 months.
Tools and resources used:
Internet Archive Wayback Machine (HTML snapshots of old Line Rider sites)
Peggo and SaveFrom (downloading YouTube videos)
ffmpeg (video conversion and compression)
Dropbox (hosting and updating)
Line Rider JavaScript (Line Rider track file conversion)
In a way I started this archive back in 2008, when I started saving my favorite Line Rider videos to my computer so I could be sure I would always have them. In another way I started it in 2011, when ZNF’s YouTube channel was hit with a series of copyright takedowns that caused the entire channel to be deleted and I set up a YouTube channel to reupload as many tracks that could be found. But I formally began this project in January 2016, when I realized that Line Rider videos disappearing off YouTube (for various reasons) was happening with worrisome regularity, and decided to do something about it.
There were generally four stages in the process. The first stage of the process was downloading all the videos of well known Line Rider YouTube channels I could find, followed most of the less known YouTube channels I could find. The second stage was going through hundreds of thousands of Internet Archive Wayback Machine webpage snapshots from sites such as I Ride the Lines, Linerider.org, and Linerider.com, and saving the ones that I found relevant to Line Rider history, along with a bunch of additional YouTube channels I discovered in the process (this took forever). The third stage was making some long overdue video records of major contests, and digging through all the track files I had collected to put together the videos in the Archival Release series, which was lots of fun. The last stage was indexing all the files that needed to be cross referenced, and generally finalizing the whole thing and then uploading it.
Curator's Note
This archive is not a done deal, but will continue into the future as more Line Rider tracks are created. In the future, I may look into expanding this archive by archiving things like the existing Line Rider websites, or the YouTube channel web pages themselves - but that’s something I’ll decide down the road.
I decided to monetize this project, even though it wasn’t a Line Rider video, because I felt like it was an important and worthwhile endeavor. On the other hand, I’m only monetizing this as a “standard” project despite spending about 10 to 50 times the amount of time I would spend on the typical Line Rider track. Additionally, it costs me about $8 per month to pay for the Dropbox Pro account to host it (to be clear, I don't use it exclusively for this archive, but it takes up way more space than anything else). For those reasons, I’m going to put a PayPal donate button here, for anyone who came across this page and wants to throw few bucks my way for curating and maintaining the archive: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/baharv89
Praise
"This was a huge effort on your behalf, and it's almost invaluable. Who knows how many tracks you prevented from being lost forever, and how many tracks you recovered or unveiled that creators weren't necessarily going to post in the process. Amazing job!"
- Sheldon (Line Rider creator)"An incredible and tremendously valuable effort. 10+ years of LR history, in one place."
- Helios Pavonine (Line Rider creator)
"What a massively ambitious project to undertake. Quite incredible that you've single-handedly assembled such a comprehensive LR database! This is of so much value to the LR community."
- Jon Tiburzi
"Astounding work, I've already been through a few folders now of tracks I haven't seen since I started playing. This is really good, I could sit and explore this for hours."
- Chuggers (Line Rider creator)"I'm pretty sure you've saved a lot of videos and maps from fading into non-existence. That's amazing! Nice job."
- nightandtodaypizza