Giving Video Fingerprinting the Finger
or, How To Stash Video
NY Times: YouTube Sets Tests of Video Blocking… With Youtube/Google planning to remove and ban videos using ‘Video Fingerprinting’ technology in association with Disney and Time Warner, this seemed like the perfect time to explain how you can go about archiving videos from Youtube on your own computer, and how you can share those videos with others on Alterati.TV
You may have noticed that Alterati.tv has already accrued a wide variety of video, both original content and content liberated from Youtube, DailyMotion, Google Video, or other video sharing sources. Well, I am going to provide you with some step-by-step instructions on how to do this yourself.
There are a number of sites online which provide download services. Here’s three, of a large number of sites all providing similar services:
- Flashload at erightsoft.com/KVk.html
- YouTubex at youtubex.com/
- Video Downloader 2.0 at javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php
For those of you using Firefox for web browsing, you can also download the Video Downloader plug-in, which is what I’ve been using for the last few months.
In fact, the step-by-step instructions that follow are screenshots from the Video Downloader 1.1.1 extension for Firefox.
First, you have to find something decent to download from one of these sites. There’s enough videos of cats yowling, people in pain or on fire, and goofy remakes of music videos out there clogging the net. Alterati aims for a more refined sense of the bizarre and the obscure, and hopefully you can play along with the aesthetic by selecting videos worth viewing. If it’s timely, or strange, or something you just know won’t be around a week from now once these Video Fingerprinting censorship bots start scouring Google Video and Youtube, then by all means archive that shit.
Once you have the video in front of you, and assuming you’ve installed the firefox extension, you can click the icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the browser window to start the download.
A screen will appear giving you instructions and (in the case of some file sources) a few different ways to download the video. For example, Google Video will allow you to download in a few different formats. Youtube videos only come in .FLV format.
Start the download. Keep in mind that for longer videos, it may take a while for the full video to transfer. I had all sorts of problems when I first started using this, mainly because I’m fairly impatient. I’d start three or four downloads at once, then get lost trying to figure out which video was which since they’re all downloaded with generic file names. So do these one at a time until you get a feel for what you’re doing.
Once the video is downloaded, you’ll need to rename it. All videos are transferred initially with the generic name ‘Get_Video’ and have no file extension. Simply rename the video something sensible related to the video’s content and add .FLV to the end of the name, and you have a file ready to upload. If you’d like, you could get a file converter to change the file type, but Altertube happily accepts .FLV files so there’s really nothing else you need to do to ready the file for upload once you’ve renamed it.
Logically, of course, the next step is to log in to Altertube and click the upload link which will bring you to the next screen shown below:
The arrows above show where you’ll need to provide info about the video so others can find it via tags or by searching the site. Keep in mind that the four different radio buttons designate which channel the video you upload will be stored. Fill in the form with all the appropriate information, then browse to the file and start the upload.
A few notes regarding FLV. FLV files are very compact, upload quickly, and have decent sound quality, meaning they can be easily shared over instant messaging software or via email as well as through Altertube. There’s a good deal of specific information about .FLV format files on wikipedia if you’re interested in learning more about the file format itself.
Lastly, I’d like to recommended 
GOM, a media player that does a wonderful job playing .FLV formatted files you download in this fashion. I’ve been using this particular media player more and more, and I’m quickly becoming a die-hard fan. Not only does the interface run smoothly, it’s visually appealing and handles a wide variety of file formats. So not only are you able to archive your favorite videos and share them without fear they’ll evaporate from the net, you can watch them from your own hard drive without even being online. Until next time…
