Save Classics Student Project Videos!

[Andrew Reinhard]

One of our eClassics members noticed that the Fourth Declension Opera student video is no longer available as its creator took the video off of YouTube which broke the link here. If you know of a reliable tool that can allow one to rip a YouTube video to a file (e.g. .avi), please send me suggestions on what to try. I'd like to create a more permanent archive of the Classics movies we have here. If you'd like to volunteer to rip the films and then burn to CD or DVD, let me know via mail through the site.

Andrew Reinhard
eClassics founder/admin

[kevin hartley]

I know that if you're running linux, youtube videos show up in /tmp as a file with the name "Flash" followed by a few random characters. Once the video loads completely, just rename the video or move it elsewhere and you have the video. It's in FLV format instead of AVI, but there are various methods out there to convert between the two (I'd probably use VLC to do it myself, but there are others). However, this doesn't address the issue of copyright of said videos, and I have no idea how to address that.

[Andrew Reinhard]

Thanks Kevin. I don't plan on distributing the videos, only conserving them -- most videos are posted by their creators on YouTube but without any identification whatsoever either in the explanatory text or in the form of credits, so chasing copyright is confounding. I can certainly cite where the video was downloaded from in the expository text next to the movie itself.

[kevin hartley]

There are also ways to get the cached videos out similarly with other OSes, but it's easiest on linux since the cache is just the /tmp directory instead of some random, encrypted directory. I've been using this for personal use for some time (I can't watch youtube videos at work, but if I save them to my HD from elsewhere, I can then watch during downtime).