Media and views

A capture has two derived layers on top of the canonical JSON: the localised media, and the rendered views. Both are controlled at capture time, and both can be rebuilt later from the JSON.

Choosing media

--media decides what gets downloaded beside the records:

tori archive karpathy --guest --media all     # photos and video (default)
tori archive karpathy --guest --media photos  # photos only
tori archive karpathy --guest --media none    # records only, no media

For video, --video picks the rendition:

tori archive karpathy --guest --video best    # highest quality (default)
tori archive karpathy --guest --video worst   # smallest file

Stream-only video

Some X video is served only as an adaptive stream, not a single downloadable file. tori cannot fetch those on its own and records them in the manifest as stream-only. Point --tool at an external downloader (yt-dlp handles X streams) to capture them:

tori archive karpathy --guest --tool yt-dlp

The capture summary reports stream-only counts so you know when the tool is worth adding.

How media is localised

Everything downloaded lands under media/, bucketed by type (photo, video, gif, avatar, banner). Each file's name is the media key plus a short hash of its source URL, which makes two things true: two renditions of one item never collide, and a photo referenced by a thousand tweets resolves to a single file on disk. The rendered pages rewrite their src attributes to these local paths, so the archive opens with no network.

The manifest is honest about what made it: every media item is recorded as local, unavailable, stream-only, or skipped.

Choosing views

--view selects which rendered views to write. JSON is always written regardless:

tori archive karpathy --guest --view html,md   # both (default)
tori archive karpathy --guest --view html      # HTML only
tori archive karpathy --guest --view md        # Markdown only

HTML gives you a browsable index.html, per-tweet pages, and conversation pages under threads/. Markdown gives you a README.md index plus per-tweet and per-thread Markdown.

Re-rendering offline

Because the views are derived, you can rebuild them from the stored JSON at any time with no network:

tori render $HOME/data/tori/x/karpathy

This is how you add a Markdown view to an HTML-only archive, or replay a renderer improvement over an old capture:

# Add Markdown to an archive that only had HTML
tori render $HOME/data/tori/x/karpathy --view md

tori render reads only tweets/<id>.json and profile.json. It never touches the network and never re-downloads media. Pass --date to fix the footer stamp for reproducible output.

Next

• Incremental and resumable captures: keeping the archive current.