FreeGameDev

Hi,

I vaguely remember there being a website where you could submit youtube links to convert them to a non-flash format, which was used in some freegamer articles.
Does anyone remember the URL of it? Or any other site doing something similar?

I'm trying to go without Flash at the moment, so am looking for ways to work around videos which aren't in HTML5 or similar yet.

edit: Just noticed that the VideoDownloadHelper plugin actually also allows downloading Flash videos I can't normally see in my browser. That makes it easy to download and view them in VLC.

cclive is a command-line utility for downloading videos from Youtube.

A lot of the videos on Youtube are available is a variety of formats (not just FLV which is the flash video format), but programs like VLC play FLV format videos just fine.

WEBM format was another format that was going to be available on Youtube -- I don't know if that ever panned out. Hopefully someone can shed a lot more light about all this than me.....

Ah, thanks for the cclive tip. Just tried it. Works very well (at least for youtube, haven't tried elsewhere yet) and I didn't even have to read the manual to use it. "cclive URL1 URL2 ..." and it just works.
Also the two videos I downloaded seem have been downloaded in the WebM format, so it looks like that is still available, and VLC has no problems playing it.

The only problems seem to be some special youtube links like http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu-onRR ... XCf3-7djGg, but that's easy to fix by clicking on the direct video link.

No such thing as an HTML5 format though OGV is unlikely to be it. The chances are that H.264 will be the format as Mozilla has now committed itself to create an open source implementation of it and Google never removed it from Google Chrome as promised. Of course, Apple and Microsoft continue to oppose OGV and WebM.

KIAaze, it was tinyogg, which does not exist any more.

I highly recommend youtube-dl for downloading the .webm format videos.

I wouldn't recommend you actually do this by the way. Videos have to be converted from the Flash wrapper for MP4 (or MP4 itself, some downloaders support downloading just that). This loses clarity and quality. I really would not recommend it.

One of the coolest aspects of youtube-dl is that you can download whole playlists. So stick something in a YouTube playlist (or find someone else's, there's loads) and download away.

Ah, yes, tinyogg, that's the one. Thanks for all the alternative suggestions.