Download Feature May Come to Youtube
For those of you that like to compile collections of funny or other important videos from the widely popular YouTube service, you could be in for change. Change for the better.
For quite some time, people have been making use of miscellaneous tools to download videos from the widely popular YouTube service, but since all videos downloaded from YouTube via the freely available tools are in .flv (Flash Video) format – a format that not all video players directly support without a codec download or other special software, makes for sharing these videos to friends via email, or transferring them to portable devices a bit on the difficult side.
Videos in Barack Obama’s YouTube channel “ChangeDotGov” have a feature that no other videos on YouTube currently have – a download option. Downloaded videos from this channel are in MPEG4 (H.264) format and can be easily shared or added to your iTunes collection and even transferred and played on most portable devices.
Google had originally started to test this feature about a week ago, and now it appears that it is functional and ready to deploy around the rest of the YouTube service. The video download service was originally mentioned on Lawrence Lessig’s Blog, a Stanford University law professor and advisor to Obama.
Quoting Lessig we find the following :
“YouTube is rolling this out slowly, initially with content that aspires to be consistent with principles of open government.”
There is obviously a lot of room for speculation here as well. Some people believe that the video download service will be limited to user-generated videos only as to protect copyrighted content, naturally – something that shouldn’t be much of a concern unless YouTube plans to offer copyright material in High Definition.
None the less, if this new feature were to surface across the YouTube board, it would be very cool, and very handy all at once. Let’s see what happens.
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"YouTube is rolling this out slowly, initially with content that aspires to be consistent with principles of open government."
I'm sorry I disagree, and since YT is a corporate entity I doubt it has any obligation as regards freedom of speech. I've seen countless video's on their taken down that just happen to be critical of both politicians and their policies, something that is not against the law. I think that what you are going to see here is a) advertising embedded in those downloads, b) the downloads being overwhelmingly focussed towards a particular agenda and c) the rest of the YT community giving up on YT as a portal for free speech.
And by the way, this comes from someone who uses YT an awful lot, right from the start. Like the 'Internet 2', YT seems to have transformed from a public interest into a private one.
These are just my views, which I am not saying are right. They're conclusions based on my observations over 2 years as well as my discussions with people of similar interests. Portraying an open government on YT sounds good, but I think that in reality it's nothing more than corporate-sponsored propaganda.
See, this is what gets me. Historically YT seems to have been dead set against downloadable content. YT also removed the broadcast bulletin feature, isolating millions of users from spreading and sharing video's an information to other users.
Yet all of a sudden, Obama is in office and hey presto: it's all about change and yet you look at who's driving this change. I doubt very much it's the will of the people.
The download feature still not come.
I use Video Download Studio for free downloading YouTube video..
http://www.downloadvideos-convert.com/