8

For past few years I have favorited many videos which were very good. But I have seen plenty of videos get removed, either by their owner, or due to copyright matching.

Some of these videos are very rare and hard to find. So I am thinking of saving every video either to my personal YouTube account and make it private, or finding another video hosting site and copying the videos there.

But I don't know how I can copy videos from YouTube automatically. I don't want to manually download each video and then upload to new site, one by one.

Is there any automatic way of transferring all the videos on a YouTube account to another video hosting site?

Or, if someone can recommend another video hosting site that supports some form of YouTube account import, that will work as well.

Improve this question
4
  • 1
    If copyright does become an issue with any particular video, then what you're describing is likely to make it worse.
    – pavium
    May 29, 2011 at 3:52
  • But i want to save it for personal viewing only , i am not puting in public video sharing . i will make it private
    – Mirage
    May 29, 2011 at 3:55
  • 1
    this is OK -- we assume fair use unless there is obvious and compelling evidence that something is being done for an explicitly illegal purpose. I don't see that here. See meta.superuser.com/questions/2212/… for rationale.
    – Jeff Atwood
    May 29, 2011 at 4:53
  • The solution is quite easy: download all your videos using any plugin and upload lets's on vimeo
    – Yuriy
    Jun 18, 2012 at 0:56

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
7

Full Disclosure: I am the lead developer on the site I'm mentioning...

If you can get the URL to the .FLV file (just google 'how to get FLV URL youtube'), Upload by Transfer is what we call it. That feature gets released next week on our platform (see blog post for details). You provide the URL to the FLV, and the cloud service pulls it off and transcodes it.

Edit: Just tried this with the KeepVid suggestion in another answer. Just picked a popular YouTube video... http://play.nimbushd.com/view/lfsv

This is normally meant for production shops with automated workflows (HTTP/FTP servers) but FLV is supported and it's no different. And in the interest of neutrality I suppose you could also do this with encoding.com if you had a destination for it (an FTP server or something).

If you're not looking for a cloud service/hosted platform, then of course there are YouTube downloaders and you can just save the .FLV files off to your hard drive.

Improve this answer
2
  • I would like to be proven wrong, but I don't think it is possible to use the URLs outside of a browser context (cookies?) after the changes in 2010-07. See What happened to YouTube download URLs?.
    – Peter Mortensen
    Jun 1, 2011 at 9:08
  • 1
    @Peter, this is correct. For the newer videos we had to add a special import feature to our video platform to be able to retrieve the YouTube files.
    – Brandon
    Jun 8, 2011 at 7:13
1

KeepVid exposes URLs for the various formats of the video, so I suppose that it wouldn't be too hard to whip up a program that:

  • sends a YouTube URL to KeepVid,
  • retrieves the URL for the best quality video,
  • uses that URL to download the video to your HD,
  • and then uploads that video to YouTube or another video service.
Improve this answer
3
  • The URLs from KeepVid only works in the same browser context (cookies?). See What happened to YouTube download URLs?.
    – Peter Mortensen
    Jun 1, 2011 at 9:10
  • @ Peter Since all of this (url to KeepVid and download of video) would be happening within one program that mimics a browser session (including cookies), that shouldn't be an issue, I guess.
    – BCdotWEB
    Aug 30, 2011 at 7:10
  • BCdotNET, it is just that sending a download URL found by KeepVid to someone else (or to one's download program) will not work.
    – Peter Mortensen
    Sep 4, 2011 at 21:18

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.