You really have to snicker at YouTube trying to suppress tools that let you capture video to disk. Lessig is amusing on the subject. Uh, just in case there are one or two people in the universe who still don’t know: if you post video to YouTube (or to anywhere else on the Web), it can be captured and downloaded and it will be captured and downloaded and no lawyer in the world, however expensive and threatening, can stop this happening. Deal with it.
Contributions
November 17, 2006
· Technology (90 fragments)
· · Web (396 more)
· Business (126 fragments)
· · Intellectual Property (48 more)
· Technology (90 fragments)
· · Web (396 more)
· Business (126 fragments)
· · Intellectual Property (48 more)
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Norman Walsh (Nov 17 2006, at 13:22)
Funny thing is, most of the time audio doesn't work for me when I'm streaming video in firefox. Dunno if it's a config problem or just that my music player has a lock on the audio system or what. The practical side effect of this is that if I really want to see a video clip, I always go through the hurdles to get a local copy that I can play with mplayer.
On the one hand, this is clearly a bug in my browser setup. On the other, it reduces even further my interest in video clips and I think that's a feature :-)
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From: Stephen (Nov 17 2006, at 15:01)
Well, I'm reasonably computer literate, and I haven't figured out how to do it. I gave up when I ended up with some esoteric Flash format that I then apparently needed to hunt down a player for. I didn't care that much, and I don't want to collect clips that I won't be able to play in standard softare. Or spend time figuring out how to convert them. (And then taking time to do that.)
I think you overestimate the patience and free time that the average person has to spend time dicking around with software.
It's like the "outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns" fallacy: some will ... but some won't, because getting the guns is more difficult.
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From: Phillip Kast (Nov 17 2006, at 22:14)
Norman: are you by any chance running linux? And using the new beta Flash player to stream that video? As far as I can tell there are still some pretty serious audio bugs in that thing.
PS, go mplayer go!
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From: Aristotle Pagaltzis (Nov 18 2006, at 07:17)
Stephen:
I’m not sure what your fuss is about. <http://keepvid.com/> provides a bookmarklet with which you can trivially get a download link for any video on the popular video hosting services, and Flash Video support is included out of the box in the VideoLAN Client player (<http://www.videolan.org/vlc/>), which I use on Windows because I don’t have the patience to “dick around” with Windows Media Player and its zany codec parade.
There amount of nerdery involved is miniscule at best.
Not sure why YouTube is making such a big deal about it.
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