As
discussed over the weekend, in less than two weeks the millions of videos uploaded to six-year-old erstwhile YouTube competitor Google Video will
no longer be viewable. Though a download button has been added to each video page for easy back-up,
that will only be available though May 13th, and the company will not be offering transfer service for users with YouTube accounts. The search giant has been slowly winding down the service over the years since their billion-dollar buyout of YouTube, controversially
revoking purchased content (with a refund) in 2007 and
disabling new uploads in 2009. The shutdown is a big blow to the web video ecosystem, as Google Video was one of the few major services to allow free hosting of long-form video, including the content for many popular MetaFilter posts. But all is not lost! Reddit users have organized
a virtual potluck to share the most interesting and unique videos not available anywhere else, and the
Archive Team, preserver of doomed web properties like Geocities (
previously), is partnering with Archive.org to
back up as much content as possible. In that spirit, click inside for a list of some of the most popular Google Video-centric content posted here over the years.
[
Note: Oodles of kudos to Mefi's Own
FishBike for helping to prepare this post, by scraping the database for all posts linking to video.google.com and sorting by favorites. The list includes some content from before favorites were around, but I surely would have missed lots of good stuff without his handy (meta)filtered list!]
Single links are in the title where available, see the (via) for multi-link content on the original post page. Lots of posts were skipped where the video wasn't available, so all of these should work.
2005
*
The original Family Guy (
via)
*
Conan's Walker Texas Ranger lever (
via)
*
First-person view of a 14-minute high-speed car chase (
via)
*
Panama Canal time-lapse video (
via)
2006
* "Physics for Future Presidents" lecture series (
via)
*
Threads, a horrifying nuclear war drama (
via)
*
A BBC documentary on Texas Christians converting to Islam (
via)
*
Cool guitar solo by Stanley Jordan (
via)
*
Fear of Girls, a 10-minute mockumentary about stereotypical RPG players (
via)
*
Riding a maglev train in Japan (
via)
*
An hour-long documentary on one man's walking tour of Japanese history (
via)
*
The original half-hour demo for Spore that wowed just about everybody (
via)
*
"Flickr: The Musical" by Johnathan Coulton (
via)
*
Footage of Tsar Bomba, the world's largest nuclear bomb test (
via)
*
Don't copy that floppy! (
via)
*
Little Things that Jiggle: Richard Feynman and Atomic Physics (
via)
*
Back to the Future I & II synched (
via)
*
Hundreds of students impersonate molecular motion (
via)
*
WWII aerial footage (
via)
*
The finest tap dancing ever filmed (
via)
*
Tons of UC Berkeley college lectures (
via)
*
Alive in Joburg, the original short film prequel to
District 9 (
via)
*
1955 footage of the star-studded Rhythm and Blues Revue (
via)
*
£10,000 dominoes (
via)
*
Radiohead Live - OK Computer Tour (
via)
2007
* Lots of MST3K episodes in
this megapost
* Tons of George Carlin specials (
via)
* Classic Marx Brothers (
via)
*
Nosferatu, The Immigrant, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (
via)
*
Richard Feynman - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (
via)
*
Documenting the history of atheism (
via)
* Tons of random Christmas special episodes (
via)
*
Chomsky vs. Buckley (
via)
* Creepy TV hacking incidents (
via)
*
Hilarious Windows 386 promotional video (
via)
*
Google Research's Videos of the Year (
via)
2008
*
"The Return of Clockwork Orange" discussing Kubrick's classic film (
via)
*
aubilenon's homemade Rube Goldberg machine (
via)
* A pair of popular lectures explaining why you
shouldn't talk to
the police (
via)
*
Classic Abbot & Costello (
via)
*
Four hours of MTV's Sifl & Olly (
via)
* A collection of full-length film noir classics (
via)
* "How Buildings Learn," a six-part BBC documentary on architecture (
via)
* "The Trap," a three-episode documentary on the development of the concept of individual freedom (
via)
*
Super amusing playthroughs of the sadistically hard Kaizo Mario game mod (
semi-via)
(speaking of which, the
Let's Play Archive contains significant Google Video content of narrated classic video game walkthroughs for all systems, which it's likewise racing to preserve before it's too late.)
2009
*
"Inside the Chernobyl Sarcophagus," a gripping documentary on the suicidal attempts to contain the nuclear disaster (
via)
* The Cowboy Bebop movie
"Knockin' On Heaven's Door" (
via)
* An anthropological documentary look at "the human animal" in six parts (
via)
* Multiple gay history documentaries from Stonewall to the present (
via)
*
High Tech Soul and
Pump Up the Volume, electronic music documentaries (
via)
2010
*
Jim Henson's hour-long film "The Cube" (
via)
*
Videotaped US sea burial of lost Soviet submariners (
via)
*
A lengthy talk from Buckminster Fuller (
via)
*
"The Plague Dogs," a harrowing animated film about escaped research animals (
via)
* Several links to English anime dubs in
this megapost from filthy light thief
*
The Space Ghost Christmas Special (
via)
* A
multi-part narrated playthrough of Douglas Adams's cult classic video game
Starship Titanic (
via)
2011
*
The complete first season of machinima comedy hit
Red vs. Blue (
via)
*
A 42-minute documentary on a survivor's escape from Auschwitz in his own words (
via)
* From Friday's thread:
National Collegiate Debate Championship,
Douglas Hofstadter docudrama,
1989 global warming documentary,
Kubrick's "Fear and Desire",
Parisian bookstore documentary,
Douglas Adams interview,
BBC on worker co-ops,
Adam Curtis's documentaries,
a look at humanity's dependence on animals,
Joel Bauer describes the contents of his suitcase,
David Attenborough on uncontacted New Guinea tribes,
1980s children's puppetry TV,
Superman: The Musical!
See also:
Authors@Google, Tech Talks, and other Google-produced video
posted by LSK at 1:32 PM on April 18, 2011 [1 favorite]