Saturday, July 11, 2009

Downloading YouTube videos with TubeTV again

One-line Summary
If the TubeTV download button is disabled in a YouTube video page, refresh the page (Apple+R) and hit the button while it's available.

Whole Story
I use TubeTV to download music videos those funny user-generated videos from YouTube. I've set it to encode the videos for my iPhone, then them directly in my iTunes library, tagged as Music Videos. Amazingly, it was released in early 2008, and it's still avoiding all the crap that has come to YouTube since (annotations, ads). Thank you YouTube for not tampering with the H.264 stream in the Flash files!

I usually wait until the YouTube video loads completely before I hit TubeTV's download button, so I don't download the same bits twice. But, as of recently, I've noticed that the download button becomes disabled at some point during the video's load. I was scared for a second, and thought the days of my easy downloading are over.

After my 2-seconds panic went away, I tried refreshing the page, and the download button was enabled again. The videos are still downloaded, encoded for iPhone, and deposited into iTunes' library just fine.

Closing Thoughts
Too bad TubeTV wasn't open sourced, even though looks like its author abandoned it. One day, it will stop working. Hopefully, something better will be written by then. Or YouTube will start using <video> tags and serve us the H.264 data on a silver platter. And the RIAA / MPAA will let that slide. Right.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. @dave: I removed your comment because of the irrelevant link. Please talk to me if you believe you had a good reason for that link and I missed it.

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  3. have you thought that maybe some of the video uploaders don`t want their personal video to be shared by downloading? they are uploading for views and for entertainment and that is it!

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