Good site for video downloads?

[gavstar]

Hello.
I find iTunes quite limited with the videos it offers, and so what sites do PHers recommend for finding classics such as "Smack my bitch up" and Eric Prydz for download, free or paying?

[julianhj]

www.youtube.com

[gavstar]

Cool, cheers for that. FSR my proxt at work won't allow me to see it. I'll check it out at home later.

[r988]

If you want to download direct and not fiddle about with special programs to download Youtube stuff, use Yahoo Video, it's not like google video or Youtube where people upload videos, but a search of video files on the internet. I find it provides some interesting stuff sometimes but a lot of crud. The good thing is you can download most of it direct. For music videos and stuff though YouTube is probably the king at the moment.

[gavstar]

Sorry to bounce this back to the top again. Am I right in thinking you can't actually download/save the videos on www.youtube.com? Are there any good sites where you can?

[Pigeon]

gavstar said:

Am I right in thinking you can't actually download/save the videos on www.youtube.com?

No, but it's an arseache...

You have to look through the source code of the web page and find the line containing:

blahblahblah/player2.swf?video_id=SomEGArbAge&l=CrAp&t=SOmemoREGarbaGEblahblahblah

You then copy that, delete the blahblahblah/player2.swf on the beginning, the blahblahblah on the end, and the &l=CrAp from the middle. That leaves you with

?video_id=SomEGArbAge&t=SOmemoREGarbaGE

You then stick http:/ /w ww.youtube.com/get_video on the front of that:

http:/ /ww w.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=SomEGArbAge&t=SOmemoREGarbaGE

That is the URL which you pass to whatever HTTP client you're going to use to download the file:

wget http:/ /w ww.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=SomEGArbAge&t=SOmemoREGarbaGE -O filename.flv

or cut and paste it into GetRight, or copy it and middle-click in the rendering area with Firefox or Opera, or whatever you have to do with Internet Exploder.

The resulting flash video (ack, spit) (.flv) file can probably be played by opening it from a browser with a flash plugin. I refuse to have a flash plugin installed and so I convert them to some more useful format with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i filename.flv -acodec copy filename.avi

Note that the URL you end up generating is only valid for a limited amount of time, so if you take too long doing this it won't work. Don't know exactly how long it is though; it's not too bad a problem.

Note also that my examples have got spurious spaces in them to try and avoid PH linkifying them...