Download online videos to your Mac with this powerful convertor

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/28/download-online-videos-to-your.html

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buying this software is even civil disobedience, in line with Boingboing’s philosophy!

the US trade representative identifies stream ripping as “emerging trend” that causes “substantial economic harm”. the document is great, pages 11 to 15 include a curated list of Notorious Online Markets, most of them are new to me.

Of you can just use JWZ’s free perl script to do the same thing for both Youtube and Vimeo.

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I suppose Perian is too old now?

Also, if this is a Macintosh application, why the picture of a smartphone?

or you can just go to keepvid.com for free.

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There are plenty of free alternatives.
But maybe buying a product is the real act of civil disobedience here.
After all, the free tools won’t be going away anytime soon, but certain people are trying to do their best to make sure that everyone agrees that home taping is killing music and that such tools should be illegal.

Actually, I’d want one of the companies selling such products to take states to invester-state arbitration courts (as established by various free trade agreements) whenever they run into legal trouble. After all, that’s what those courts are for, isn’t it?

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Slysoft (of AnyDVD fame) was not shy to countersue whenever orgs like MPAA & Co tried to use legal measures to shut the software down. and, as I just learnt skimming the article, the company is no more - but, Zombie-like, a nearly identical one in possession of all the code and workforce, was founded half the globe away

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It seems to me a lot of scripts or tools like keepvid.com, and probably the product on offer as well, have a nasty habit of quickly becoming incompatible with Youtube’s various machinations.

Verily, I miss the good ol’ days when you could just pause the video, let it buffer completely, and then go into the browser cache and copy out the downloaded .flv file.

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Every time Youtube changes their system to make downloading more difficult, JWZ soon issues an update to his script to make it work again.

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brew install youtube-dl

Free fast, actually supports most video sites. You’re welcome.

Also available via Macports, Cygwin, most Unix distros, and as a standalone download, including a Windows exe.

https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

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Just checked. You still can do it by hand using only Fiddler, just like with facebook videos. All it takes is a keen eye to identify the URL to the MP4 file (hint: it’s the only call to googlevideo.com) and you just copy-paste it into a browser or into wget or similar.

I am not sure how they are making it harder. lol

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This browser addon works great: https://github.com/gantt/downloadyoutube
MediaHuman also makes one I’ve used: http://www.mediahuman.com/youtube-downloader/
There are many other free scripts and plugins…

That being said, I usually use the Softorino one mentioned in the article because it is by far the best. It allows 4k video downloads, various formats and targets, including ripping as audio to mp3 and m4a with embedded meta data and album art, and can even send the videos or audio directly to your iPhone without iTunes. The same company makes Waltr which takes the pain out of loading media to an iPhone and is so much better at loading then iTunes, it can even load media over wifi. Apple could learn a lot from these folks. Good software. I seldom recommend software, but their software is worth every cent.

This software does downloading, conversion, and loading, it is a much more complete tool then most others.

They break videos up into multiple stream segments…try grabbing a newer encoded 4k video by looking for the mp4 link.

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