...techie question - downloading vids from youtube for collabs and wotnot - in the past i've used or, more recently, tried to use, various websites for downloading footage for collabs - but now they have stopped allowing downloads, either completely, or stopped allowing downloads with any music or won't allow me to download, here in the UK
does anyone in the UK have a solution? what are you guys using to download other people's vids from youtube for collabs and the like?
at the moment i'm getting footage just with a camera, which gives me something to work with for now, but obviously poor quality visuals
the most recent site i tried was a german site that heino uses and recommended, but it won't let me use it here in the UK
I use a different setup than what other folks mentioned...
[links are at the end of this post]
For single videos:
In Firefox, I have an extension installed called 'GreaseMonkey', which lets you install scripts into itself that allow you to control the behavior of how a web site is presented to you...
Inside GreaseMonkey, I have installed a script called 'SaveTube'.
SaveTube inserts a download button next to any site that has a video, like YT or Vimeo, Daily Motion, etc...
You can also select the quality and version of the video to download at the download button itself.
I can just click that and it will ask me to download normally.
For grabbing an entire playlist or a whole YT channel in one batch:
This is useful for watching a series of videos offline, like on your phone or tablet when traveling and not sure of having an internet connection. Once the videos are downloaded to your computer, you can then transfer them to your device by normal means.
I do not abuse this function since YT might possibly catch-on and prevent this from working.
I use a command-line Python program called youtube-dl, and you need to tell is some options on the command-line when you invoke it, such as quality, file type, how many retries and the source url (playlist or channel) and it runs very fast and will iterate through all the videos it can find.
You can also run it again later to grab new videos, and it will check the folder and see what videos you already downloaded so as to avoid duplicates.
I also pipe the actual download function to a program called 'wget' which is standard on Linux/Unix systems.
I use wget because it preserves timestamps on the video files from when they were created and uploaded to YT. youtube-dl does NOT, and piping the download to another built-in Linux/Unix program called 'curl' dies NOT either.
Timestamps are important for sorting files in chronological order, especially if you wanted to grab all the tutorial videos from say Cynthia Lin, or 'The Ukulele Teacher' and be able to watch them in order by upload date. wget will PRESERVE the upload date.
If you are on Windows or Mobile, this will NOT work this way.
On Windows you have to rely upon the functions built-in and cannot pipe the download to wget, because wget does not exist for Windows as far as I know.
Here is an example of the command line for youtube-dl to download ALL of the videos on Cynthia Lin's YT channel:
Code:
youtube-dl -f best --retries 100 --external-downloader wget https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthialinmusic/videos
Links:
https://www.greasespot.net/
http://sebaro.pro/savetube/
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
This all may be too involved for most folks, but I use the Python programming language for work, and the other stuff are part of the normal add-ons I have set up in Firefox.
If anyone wants to replicate my setup, let me know and I will be happy to help.