Download YouTube videos
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:37 - Daniel - Other - Comments (0)
Recently I wanted to download a video from YouTube. I searched for a Greasemonkey script to do the job, but I only found a old, no longer working script. Since I really wanted to download that video I fixed the script, added some options to adjust the quality and used jQuery to do the html code generation.
And since I'm a good person I uploaded the script back on userscripts.org for everyone to use.
Whenever you watch a video on YouTube you get a selection box for the quality and a download link. Just select the quality you want and click on the link or select "Save link as" and the video starts downloading. If you get a blank page, the quality you selected is not available. Just go back and select a different quality setting and try again.
YouTube Video Downloads on Userscripts.org
Tags: javascript mp4 video jquery userscripts userscripts.org youtube flv download
Video containers are shit
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:51 - Daniel - Other - Comments (2)
This is going to be a rant, so skip it if you don't care.
Video playback is a pain in the ass. It's not just about codecs and players, but the video containers themselves are shit. I only had one container that has not caused problems yet. Everything else bugged sooner or later.
WMV regularly fails to resume video playback after pause in Media Player Classic. No idea why, but pause just doesn't work here.
MP4 caused some weird problems in mplayer, where the video length is all wrong and the audio and video go out of sync. No idea what's wrong with those shitty files, but I pretty much can't watch those files like this. And to make matters worse, mplayer is the only video player that has decent performance on Linux with Compiz running. The only way to fix these files was to remux them to MKV.
AVI files sometimes come without an index, requiring rebuilding of said index. I just don't get how a encoder can fuck up a video so much that it's unplayable on some players. And why doesn't anyone check before redistributing this files?
The only container I'm happy with is Matroska (MKV). The playback works in every player I use and I have yet to encounter shitty behaviour in any player.
Tags: mkv avi mp4 wmv video mplayer
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