
Google Video shutting down, disabling public downloads on April 29 - ivank
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/google-video-prepares-to-enter-the-deadpool-for-good/
======
ivank
Archive Team is already on it; they're in #archiveteam and #googlegrape on
EFNet. I don't think that their backup will be complete or highly available,
though.

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light3
Why not just ask for the disks from google?

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sp332
Videos on GV are stored in some Google-proprietary database, so just shipping
the physical disks probably isn't useful.

~~~
patrickyeon
The spirit of his question stands: Why not ask for a database dump from
Google?

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psykotic
This finally pushed me to move Simon Peyton Jones's presentation on How to
Give a Good Research Talk from my Google Video account to YouTube. The
original recording unfortunately has dodgy audio and video quality but it's
still a gem of a talk. Check it out:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1knJ6GIUr0>

It's lucky they recently removed the 15 minute limit on my YouTube account. I
would probably not have had the patience to chop up the video.

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yuhong
Why not automatically transfer all Google Video content to YouTube?

~~~
risotto
There is so much abandoned and bullshit video on there, it couldn't possibly
be worth it.

~~~
redthrowaway
There were a lot of great longer videos that were hosted on Google Video
leading up to their acquisition of Youtube. Now, I won't argue that the
majority of the videos there are worthwhile, but it seems to me that a company
whose self-professed goal is to "organize the world's information" really
shouldn't be in the business of deleting large swaths of it. Google isn't
exactly hurting for storage capacity; what harm could come from rolling the
videos hosted there over to Youtube? It certainly couldn't hurt the average
quality of Youtube.

I'd hope that the company that runs Google Books, that saw the value in
ReCaptcha, that has cached the majority of the public-facing internet, that
has mapped most regions of the world, and that provides satellite images of
most of its surface wouldn't erase that data simply because they'd like to
reuse the harddrives.

~~~
pasbesoin
I have to agree. Two weeks notice? WTF, Google. The evil meter is dancing.

If you want people to trust you with their data, you should demonstrate more
responsibility. And just because the hosting's been "free", doesn't mean you
haven't made your pound of flesh off the advertising (speaking generally, at
least).

Here's a thought: Shove it through YouTube. Heck, just keep the data around
and convert and cache when an item is hit (those who really want it will wait
out / return after the conversion). I suppose you need to be able to tie back
to Video accounts for ownership, DMCA, etc. Still, there should be a better
solution. And a couple of weeks' notice simply isn't fair. What if someone's
tied up? On vacation? They're hosed.

Put it this way: Demonstrating yourself to be a source of "public" data loss,
is rather bad PR.

~~~
cdr
They gave notice years ago that they were phasing it out. You haven't been
able to upload anything in years. Frankly, I'm surprised it took them this
long.

~~~
pasbesoin
Well, then, I guess that compensates somewhat. Still, I'd suggest announcing
the hard date 3 or more months in advance (I'd prefer 6). People become busy
and complacent. And people may not quickly realize that a work they value has
been abandoned by its original poster.

On the upside, they are "allowing" downloads. I guess I should acknowledge
that as a serious positive.

I may have become sensitized by years of management that had similar attitudes
towards changes. Push, push, push... until suddenly, we're abandoning this,
NOW.

Different settings, but not entirely dissimilar feelings evoked.

~~~
X-Istence
Google announced this back in 2009, people have been able to download their
video's since then.

Uploading was also stopped in 2009, so crying foul now is just unwarranted.

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geuis
The only problem I ran into was that there was no download link/button.
Despite what their directions said, I currently _have_ no way to download my
old video because there's no link!

~~~
ivank
This works for me:

    
    
      python youtube-dl -t google-video-url
    

<http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/>

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PostOnce
youtube-dl is great, and I find it to be well-maintained also; if ever it
doesn't work, I just go see if there is a new version, which there invariably
is, and which invariably works. It seems to have a decent feature set, too.

I've had problems with every other youtube downloader I've tried, and none
with youtube-dl.

~~~
copper
If you haven't used this already,

    
    
        youtube-dl -U

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laujen
Does anyone know what happens to video uploaded through Blogger? Google says
it puts it in Google Video but there is no options for me to download the
video that has been uploaded. I'd email Google but... oh ya... They don't do
support.

~~~
HelloBeautiful
Just use keepvid.com or tubeminator.com to dw ur videos.

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mark_l_watson
What a nuisance. It will take me an hour to transfer my stuff that I want to
save. Er.

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DennisP
Even if everybody reposts their videos on youtube, the links to them will be
broken. Google could avoid that by moving everything to youtube themselves and
putting up redirects at the original urls.

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omouse
For the love of god, please please please download as much as you can and post
it on BitTorrent and Archive.org or some other site.

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kragen
That's really frustrating. I don't think the Internet Archive has been saving
copies of the videos, have they?

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risotto
Respect.

Edit: not a good comment for HN. More: it was a great service, and it had a
good run. And mad respect for Google for running it well but shutting it down
gracefully.

~~~
pufuwozu
I don't consider 13 days notice to be graceful. Imagine someone going on
holidays for two weeks and coming back to find out their beloved video is lost
forever.

Google isn't obligated to give a fair amount of notice but it'd be a nice
thing to do. Don't be evil.

~~~
davidmurphy
The TechCrunch article says people have until May 13 to download the videos.
You just can't stream them after April 29.

Still, this is a pretty bad job on Google's part IMHO. More notice would have
been good. (What if people were traveling or were sick for a month or
something?) Plus Google should have an option to automatically transfer videos
to Youtube.

Can't understand why Google's messing this up so badly.

~~~
pasbesoin
In terms of public relations (when it comes to the "unwashed masses"), Google
has _always_ been a very reactive company. This is at the core of some of
their most intractable problems / failure to perform (e.g. "social").

