youtube on the boobtube

October 18, 2006 2:24 PM

just a reminder..now that google is facing lawsuits and will have to delete some great youtube videos you can always download the flv videos of your favorites and burn them onto blank dvds
posted by petsounds (37 comments total)

and thus do your part to fight censorship and evil media conglomerates (i forgot to add that)
posted by petsounds at 2:33 PM on October 18, 2006

Wow. Bummer. 90% of the clips I tried to watch from your links have already been removed.
posted by CunningLinguist at 2:34 PM on October 18, 2006

Minor thread detour, but...

I try not to think about the content industries sueing youtube out of existence because of the absolute and unadulterated rage that it feels me with.

I genuinely believe that our common social good will be damaged by this manner of lawsuit, and we will be worse off as a community and society.

Yeah that might seem melodramatic, but I have a profound level of respect for what tools like youtube and wikipedia actually offer.

The idea that I can peruse historical articles talking about all manner of television, news, historical event, internet meme and so on, and with one click ad a search, find the source material is a staggeringly powerful thing.
posted by Lord_Pall at 2:35 PM on October 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

Wow, we've come along way from "Not another fucking youtube link!"
posted by empath at 2:37 PM on October 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

Well, I'm beginning to realize how much I'm actually using youtube.

Yeah it's a home to self made flaming banana style jackass clips, but I think it's represents far more than that now.

And once the media companies finish their absolute and complete destruction of it, we're all going to be worse off. And that's just sad.
posted by Lord_Pall at 2:43 PM on October 18, 2006

I genuinely believe that our common social good will be damaged by this manner of lawsuit, and we will be worse off as a community and society... The idea that I can peruse historical articles talking about all manner of television, news, historical event, internet meme and so on, and with one click ad a search, find the source material is a staggeringly powerful thing.

I couldn't agree more, but I can understand that people who make this great stuff we enjoy watching have a right to get paid... so I'm hoping that sooner or later they (i.e. faceless corporate overlords) will figure out that the way to make the most money is to just let people put the damn videos up, and sort out some kind of online video licencing scheme, something like mechanical royalties system that appears to work for music. Or some such thing.

The big video players (YouTube et. al.) slap the ads on, we gets video, the they get money, everybody happy. Going by current trends it could take a while, but big business can be funny about things like this - once one or two massive media owners make the first agreement of this kind, and its seen to be vaguely sucessful, the rest will pile in like pigs on a truffle.

And besides, if we're shooting for a vault of human video history, I'd rather hope it has far less compression than YouTube.
posted by MetaMonkey at 3:11 PM on October 18, 2006

I'm in ur tubes....
posted by CynicalKnight at 3:12 PM on October 18, 2006

NCIS Cat Fight

The interesting bit is that CBS uploaded it themselves.
posted by smackfu at 3:14 PM on October 18, 2006

MetaMonkey writes "I couldn't agree more, but I can understand that people who make this great stuff we enjoy watching have a right to get paid..."

They absolutely do not have a right to get paid. They have a privilege afforded them by the Constitution, and that privilege is (supposedly) temporary. Copyright doesn't exist to enrich copyright holders, it exists to advance the useful arts and sciences. Temporary copyright monopoly is merely the carrot we offer creators to entice them to continue to create.

YouTube and other services like it are protected by the DMCA. As long as they play by the rules the media cartels can't do anything but whine, and if they'd like to roll back that ridiculous law they can be my guest. It's the same law that's protecting the stupid CSS and other DRM schemes. The DMCA is the reason you're able, but not allowed, to back up your DVD collection.
posted by mullingitover at 3:26 PM on October 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

I've been using this bash one-liner to temporarily store YouTube videos for later watching with XBMC lately:

wget -O - 'http://youtube.com/get_video.php?'`wget -qO - 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phO3Nubtgds' | grep player2.swf | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\" -f1` > whatever.flv

or slightly easier to use in script form:

#!/bin/bash
baseurl='http://youtube.com/get_video.php?'
pageurl=$1
wget -O - $baseurl`wget -qO - $pageurl | grep player2.swf | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\" -f1`

Make sure you redirect stdout to a file.
posted by xiojason at 3:38 PM on October 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

I've been using a bookmarklet from keepvid.
posted by vacapinta at 3:40 PM on October 18, 2006

Oh. Holy Crap. I haven't seen Lambert the Sheepish Lion in years and years. In fact, I thought I dreamed it. That was lovely. That also drives home how sad it will be when they take it down. This kind of content is priceless and important.
posted by TheGoldenOne at 3:41 PM on October 18, 2006

Hmm... since when did YouTube start allowing videos over 10 minutes? If this is a Google thing, with their superlative IP lawyers? Perhaps all this copyright hand-wringing is a tad premature.
posted by MetaMonkey at 3:44 PM on October 18, 2006

s/if/is
posted by MetaMonkey at 3:44 PM on October 18, 2006

i'm no youtube fan, nor a fan of anything where large amounts of people gather to share stuff (save for mefi), but thanks much for this plugin! there've been quite a few times i've encountered embedded videos i wanted. does this work for embedded sounds too?
posted by localhuman at 4:21 PM on October 18, 2006

I try not to think about the content industries sueing youtube out of existence because of the absolute and unadulterated rage that it feels me with.

Well, fortunately for you youtube has no liability for the content that's uploaded. Rather the, unloaders are personally responsible. As long as youtube removes infringing content in 48 hours after receiving notice that the material is infringing.

Quite frankly, this is just a bunch of posturing on the part of the content company to get better licensing deals, which both parties want to be a part of.
posted by delmoi at 4:47 PM on October 18, 2006

If you're wondering, I use the 20kb video downloader plug in from firefox. I don't even need to copy the URL, just click a little button in the firefox tray.
posted by delmoi at 4:49 PM on October 18, 2006

The internet is a series of youTubes.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 4:54 PM on October 18, 2006

I've seen this more animated short as a music video and it was really cool.

I think people are over reacting. Minor copyright creators won't make the effort to remove their work, only the major ones will, and they'll probably don't do it for big things.
posted by delmoi at 4:57 PM on October 18, 2006

At least they didn't get rid of Chicken Soup!!
posted by OhPuhLeez at 5:18 PM on October 18, 2006

Nice link, huh? Let's try that again, shall we??

I said CHICKEN SOUP!!
posted by OhPuhLeez at 5:31 PM on October 18, 2006

They absolutely do not have a right to get paid. They have a privilege afforded them by the Constitution, and that privilege is (supposedly) temporary

If I may interrupt the splitting of hairs, I think you are missing the point. Creating something that ends up with a copyright stamp on it does not inherently mean someone SHOULD get paid for it. But they pretty much have every right to do whatever the fuck they want to with it, which includes getting paid and telling YouTube to take it down. You imply that copyright exists only to trick people in making something and that, in its essence, it's temporary. That's only true if by "temporary" you mean decades and decades.

Everything else you said about the DMCA is spot on, though.
posted by dhammond at 6:11 PM on October 18, 2006

"Hmm... since when did YouTube start allowing videos over 10 minutes?"

Ugh, only since, like, for EVER! God!
(Sorry, i think i watched too much youtube today.)

Seriously, tho. Since like forerver.
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 6:50 PM on October 18, 2006

It was only recently that they enacted the 10min cutoff. Videos posted before that time (that haven't been ceaced and deceased), and "director account" videos are allowed to be longer than 10mins.
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 6:54 PM on October 18, 2006

Oops, my mistake. I coincidentally saw a couple videos over 10 mins today, that I was sure would be DCMA'd if they were old, but turns out they're from before the cutoff date.
posted by MetaMonkey at 7:07 PM on October 18, 2006

#!/bin/bash
baseurl='http://youtube.com/get_video.php?'
pageurl=$1
wget -O - $baseurl`wget -qO - $pageurl | grep player2.swf | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\" -f1`

Yee gods. It's shit like this that, as a quite damn competant (if I do say so myself,) Windows-mainly desktop guy makes me wonder, "Do I even want to be able to do that? Will it make Half-Life 2 run better?"

I should have followed my bliss and become a cook.
posted by Cyrano at 7:12 PM on October 18, 2006

heh, there's also ffmpeg, which converts the first .flv it finds in your browser's cache into an avi (it doesn't work for ALL vids)

ffmpeg -i "$(find ~/.mozilla -regex '.*Cache.*' -a -not -regex '.*_CACHE_.*' -printf '%T+ %p\n' | sort -n | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs file | grep -i "Video" | tail -1 | awk -F : '{ print $1 }')" -vcodec msmpeg4v2 /tmp/video.avi
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 8:18 PM on October 18, 2006

oh. I just got your Linux-jab with the half-life refrenece. touché! i've recently converted from win2k to ubuntu, but i keep my machine dual boot so i can still run win apps if need be. Getting back on topic, Flash9 for linux is rumored to be released in the next couple weeks.....
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 8:30 PM on October 18, 2006

Interesting timing. I've been using this page to download .flv's of Youtube content for quite some time, and was up late last night grabbing some stuff that's hard to find elsewhere. Though why I haven't just started using the 20kb Firefox plugin I don't know.
posted by dreamsign at 8:54 PM on October 18, 2006

i should mention, ffmpeg can also convert downloaded .flv's to .avi's.
posted by TechnoLustLuddite at 8:59 PM on October 18, 2006

I prefer Unplug. Never seen a finer way to pry out embeds.
posted by EatTheWeak at 9:22 PM on October 18, 2006 [1 favorite]

Seems to me much of the copyrighted content on Youtube is good and effective advertising for the copyright holder. Perhaps some stockholders will realize this, and sue the shit out of some assinine shirts.
posted by Goofyy at 11:18 PM on October 18, 2006

Yes, I can think of nothing more exciting than viewing 360 x 240 flv converted clips on a dvd. w00t.
posted by prostyle at 7:09 AM on October 19, 2006

The annoying thing is this -- Seeing videos on youtube has lead me to purchase music from artists I had never even heard of before and now those exact videos are being pulled off the site. This seems like the height of stupidity
posted by Julnyes at 7:09 AM on October 19, 2006

Well sure, Julnyes. Just like back in the day, I was downloading tv shows from Kazaa while overseas, and as a result I bought several DVD sets of shows I would never have seen otherwise.

It allows you to separate the wheat from the chaff, however, so the content producers still don't like it.
posted by dreamsign at 7:41 AM on October 19, 2006

That's a sweet bash bit, xiojason. Works great.
posted by rmmcclay at 9:11 AM on October 19, 2006

Yes, I can think of nothing more exciting than viewing 360 x 240 flv converted clips on a dvd

maybe its because i have an ancient color tv from the seventies but when I watch them off the DVD they look great-- much better than on my laptop
posted by petsounds at 9:38 AM on October 19, 2006