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by phihag_ 4227 days ago
The problem is that this only works for some YouTube videos (for example it will fail for basically all VEVO videos), not to mention maintainability issues.
1 comments

I had to look up what "VEVO" was. A joint venture of several major record labels and Google launched in 2009.

Personally I have no need for "VEVO" videos. Nor do I ever encounter VEVO youtube urls posted to websites, like HN. I wonder why?

As for maintainability, I beg to differ. The raison d'etre for this script arose out of frustration that early YouTube download solutions, e.g. gawk scripts, clive, etc., kept breaking whenever something at YouTube changed. I got tired of waiting for these programs to be fixed, if that ever happened.

I can fix this 164 line script faster if YouTube changes something than waiting for a third party to fix something they developed that is far more complex. Moreover, it does not rely on Python. Is there something wrong with DIY?

I see someone posted a link in this thread to another 208 line script, yget, that uses sed and awk. This further demonstrates the relative simplicity of downloading YouTube videos.

>Personally I do not watch "VEVO" videos but I am curious what they are. //

Go to youtube.com, you may need to scroll but most unlikely, bam! "VEVO" video with x-million views: it's a music video promotion brand.

Actually it's not globally promoted so outside of Western Europe and USA I'd guess you don't get VEVO vids so much?

According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zs1ClgqhLw their 100th most viewed video has 200 million views. Top 10 are all above 600 million.

They're quite a big brand.

Interesting.

An alternative to goofing around on the youtube.com web site, scrolling constantly and getting hit with advertising and endless lists of "related" videos is to search and retrieve youtube urls from the command line via gdata.youtube.com.