Youtube's html5 videos rickroll you if you try to save them

[Dustin2128]

just something funny I noticed, if you right click and hit save video as. It's kinda disappointing though, I don't like having to go to third parties to download youtube videos.

[czr114]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006/

[Lucradia]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006/

Most of that add-ons once-free features require a subscription fee. IE: The add-on used to have no watermark, now it forces one. You also can't trans-convert to any formats anymore using the add-on, without paying.

[lisati]

Why not ask the person who uploaded the Youtube video for a copy instead of trying to circumvent the Youtube terms of service? The worst that could happen is that they say "no"..... :D

[gnomeuser]

Why not ask the person who uploaded the Youtube video for a copy instead of trying to circumvent the Youtube terms of service? The worst that could happen is that they say "no"..... :D

I admit I often find youtube-dl a very useful work around for problems with the flash player, and in my experience the html5 one isn't much better. Both will stop randomly, playback videos in a choppy fashion and with surprising regularity fail to even stream or load a video.

So in many cases for me it turns out to be quicker to download the video and play it back in Banshee or Totem so a smooth video experience.

It may be a ToS violation but it renders YouTube useful and if I want to rewatch something at a later date like a GoogleTech talk I am not wasting Googles bandwidth unneededly.

[barbedsaber]

Why not ask the person who uploaded the Youtube video for a copy instead of trying to circumvent the Youtube terms of service? The worst that could happen is that they say "no"..... :D

I did that once, for a song someone had made and uploaded

they gave me the original 320kbps mp3. He told me that apart from him, I am the only person in the world who has that mp3.

[Oxwivi]

How do you play YouTube videos in HTML5?

[hyperAura]

Oxwivi here is the link

http://www.youtube.com/html5

[Spice Weasel]

Duddeee, loaded YouTube (well, flash at least) videos are stored in /tmp.

[Oxwivi]

Oxwivi here is the link

http://www.youtube.com/html5
Ooh, thanks!

[Strategist01]

Duddeee, loaded YouTube (well, flash at least) videos are stored in /tmp.

Yeah, I always copy vids that I like out of there. And I do kinda have a quiet laugh at all the youtube downloaders out there...

[cascade9]

I admit I often find youtube-dl a very useful work around for problems with the flash player, and in my experience the html5 one isn't much better. Both will stop randomly, playback videos in a choppy fashion and with surprising regularity fail to even stream or load a video.

So in many cases for me it turns out to be quicker to download the video and play it back in Banshee or Totem so a smooth video experience.

It may be a ToS violation but it renders YouTube useful and if I want to rewatch something at a later date like a GoogleTech talk I am not wasting Googles bandwidth unneededly.

+1.


Duddeee, loaded YouTube (well, flash at least) videos are stored in /tmp.

Unless you're using the new 'sqaure' 64bit flash player.....then it still stores them in temp, but has a max size (or some similar limit) and 'breaks' the video up into several chunks. So you cant watch the videos from /tmp :(

[Spice Weasel]

Unless you're using the new 'sqaure' 64bit flash player.....then it still stores them in temp, but has a max size (or some similar limit) and 'breaks' the video up into several chunks. So you cant watch the videos from /tmp :(

e: Never mind.

[czr114]

Why not ask the person who uploaded the Youtube video for a copy instead of trying to circumvent the Youtube terms of service? The worst that could happen is that they say "no"..... :D
Download helpers aren't stealing.

They're extremely useful for eliminating the nuisance of Flash, bypassing Youtube's crappy player, and playing from a local copy with no speed/loading/seeking issues. In that respect, it functions much like a Tivo.

[modmadmike]

+1.



Unless you're using the new 'sqaure' 64bit flash player.....then it still stores them in temp, but has a max size (or some similar limit) and 'breaks' the video up into several chunks. So you cant watch the videos from /tmp :(

Chromium-browser does this only with the HTML5 videos. Chromium stores the flash videos in $HOME/.cache/chromium/Cache (and does not save them starting with the word Flash) while the HTML5 videos go to $HOME/.cache/chromium/Media\ Cache.

I still copy/watch them from /tmp/Flash* or $HOME/.cache/chromium/Cache and it still works with my version of flash with the flash videos.

[doorknob60]

Most of the time I just use Youtube-dl. It's very easy, takes just a few seconds extra. And using that you don't have to wait for it to finish to play it like you might expect, VLC will play the files while youtube-dl is still downloading :)

[ve4cib]

So in many cases for me it turns out to be quicker to download the video and play it back in Banshee or Totem so a smooth video experience.

I used to use a Greasemonkey script that let me watch YouTube videos using the Totem plugin (or VLC, or MPlayer -- whatever plugin you use to play media). It worked pretty well.

I haven't used it in a long time, and I doubt it still works, but here's my blog post about it, if anyone wants to give it a whirl: http://ve4cib.livejournal.com/49639.html

[Oxwivi]

That's an interesting solution. Would you please elaborate Totem plugin's bad quality?

[ve4cib]

That's an interesting solution. Would you please elaborate Totem plugin's bad quality?

Actually, I said that Totem's plugin was quite good. When I wrote that I'd been having all sorts of issued with Totem as a stand-alone player, and was therefore a little overly-harsh on it. Totem has gotten way better since I wrote that post -- so much so that it's my default video player now. I've still got VLC installed, but I hardly use it.

The thing I liked about Totem's plugin was that it had a play/pause button, and a scroll bar. For some arcane reason the MPlayer and VLC plugins seem to be lacking those two obvious features.

Really though, it doesn't matter what plugin you use. As long as it will play FLV videos it'll work. So use whatever makes you happy.

Basically all that script does is extract the URL to the FLV video the flash player uses, and pumps that URL straight into the plugin. Once you know what that URL is you could download the video to your HD, open in a stand-alone media player, convert it to DivX, etc... The hard part is determining what exactly the URL is.

The script is a little hacky, but it worked back then. If YouTube has changed their DOM structure, or moved around what pieces of the URL are stored where, the script won't work anymore. But basically it just finds the YouTube player's DIV, pulls out two properties: tId and vId, and concatenates them into a URL that points to the FLV file. Then it rewrites the inner HTML of the player DIV to replace it with an EMBED tag, with the "application/x-mplayer2" MIME type.

I based my script on a previous one someone else had written. The old one didn't work anymore, for the same reason mine may not work now; YouTube had changed their DOM structure just enough so that it broke.

[Oxwivi]

No, I got the part the plugin is good, but I thought you wrote the video quality with Totem's plugin is bad. By the way, isn't Totem's plugin installed by default? I mean any direct link to a video or audio plays in Totem inside the browser.

[ve4cib]

Like I said, that blog post was written some time ago. For some reason the stand-alone Totem player was always hanging up, or freezing, or the audio and video were going out-of-sync. I don't know if it was an issue with my graphics card, the sound card, or what. But whatever the problem was VLC and SMPlayer didn't have the same issues, so I used them.

Fortunately the latest version of Totem works fine. I don't know what the old problems were, but the devs did a good job fixing them.

The Totem plugin may be installed by default in Ubuntu. It seems like the kind of thing that's probably there.

[Oxwivi]

Thanks for clarifying, I'll try it soon. :D The more I get to know about HTML5. the less I like Flash. Thought I'm not sure if your solution has something to do with HTML5, I'd like to get rid of Flash anyway.

[forrestcupp]

Html5 in YouTube is crap. Full screen now only takes up the Window instead of actually being full screen.

The Rickroll is funny, though. Last I heard, Rick Astley was mad that people do that. I wonder if he's mad about someone as big as YouTube doing that.