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Google Will Save Videos After All
don9030582 writes "After Google announced it would permanently shutter its Google Videos collection, dozens of volunteers from around the world sprung into action in a massive effort to make a copy of the entire site. It was originally slated to go dark on April 29th, but now they have eliminated any such deadline and furthermore they will be migrating the collection to YouTube. We wish Google would have planned to do that from the beginning, but ultimately this is a victory for the preservation of user-generated content on the Internet."
Damn you Google: I spent last weeks sucking videos and wasting bandwith FOR WHAT? Time to send me that Nexus as a compensation, at least.
That some of my mid-2000s-era cat videos might disappear into oblivion.
God is good.
Unlike certain other companies, when the community speaks Google listens. The community has spoken and it was clear all along that the community wanted to save Google Video not so much for the legacy interface but the actual content.
As long as the content is transferred over to YouTube there wont be a problem. But a lot of content is only available on Google Video. To just erase years worth of content is just stupid. This could have been solved by just transitioning or transferring the content over in the first place.
Youtube all too often give me the "sorry, this content is not available in your country" or "this has been blocked for no reason", or has video restricted by copyright locality. Granted I'm willing to watch silly nazi propaganda and hitler parodies but hell, why should I be disallowed to?
I'll miss Google Video, as you could find some of the blocked content on it.
Nothing could have diminished faith in the cloud more than to delete years worth of content overnight from the cloud.
It was a dumb idea to even discuss deleting it forever when Google wants us to trust them to host the data forever.
While it's nice to see Google doing the right thing, I question their change of heart. My own guess would be that far more people began leeching ungodly amounts of Google Video content, putting a strain on Google itself.
Rather than continue the pain, Google simply decided to allow people to transfer video from Google Video to YouTube.
will be impressed by this invaluable collection preserving teen skateboard wipeouts.
I have a feeling that when this does happen about 1/3 of the videos will ultimately be taken down do to draconian copy right laws.
I've noticed that Google Videos hosts quite a bit of adult content, the likes of which are unseen on YouTube. What happens to those videos?
this sounds like an evil plot to make ppl panic and grab all their fav vids. then track and profile us all... it IS google after all.
So will videos on Google Video need to be re-encoded to play on YouTube?
A lot of the content on Google Video is already postage-stamp sized and blurry. A further encoding could make them unviewable but all but the most dedicated fans.
Yes, a victory for user-generated content. It's nice to have a victory where we all lose.
This is why the paranoid and idiots should NOT breed.
A: This is google, they got more bandwidth.
B: To save bandwidth from people downloading movies, they put the movies on site where you can download them...
Go kick your parents, they are really to blame.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I emailed Google Video suport back on 3.31.08 about transferring 30 videos over to YouTube. They replied "Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, there is no way to transfer videos from one account to another account at this time." I guess I was ahead of the curve, or I should I say, cloud.
I have lately opted for Vimeo. Google HD videos are sometimes really slow to load. I don't know why. Everything seems to be ok, but video just isn't loading as expected. With Vimeo I haven't had that problem ever. Vimeo image quality is also clearly superb. Content quality is also clearly better.
Funny enough the email from Google about this ended up in my Gmail's "Spam" folder.
You wish Google would have?
When exactly will you be posted that from?
Of course they will!
They saved all your wifi traffic, why not save your videos too!
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
that Google would ever relinquish any data on anything?
but hell, why should I be disallowed to?
Because you and millions of others like you continue to vote for legislatures that continue to allow this to happen.
Youtube now has a fairly robust advertising system and Google has been supporting both Youtube and Google Video to be able to get to this point where it could be possible to make money. Google Video wasn't ever going to be capable of supporting this and it wasn't worth their time so they just said fuck it. Then they realized that killing Google Video would have been a black stain on their reputation so they are now planning to migrate it over. Yay for us!
No, it's like a water oasis in the dry west.
I agree they were never going to destroy the water. They just at first decided to remove all of the public access facilities.
No one's yet mentioned the other side of the story - to "start this campaign" all these volunteers - had to commit copyright infringement! So the wild part is that instead of suing each user for $ONE BILLION DOLLARS each, they said "oh, cool. You like that stuff. Okay, we'll keep it so we can make some ad money."
Remember that story about "what happens if Google buys Big Music"? *Relatively* Google is lax on copyright because they understand ad revenue relies on sharing velocity. So if they bought Big Music, and I wish they'd buy the airports and do a colossal Frontier Airlines makeover on them, in one administration all those security and **AA execs stuffed into the Gov driving the Winter of Fear are going to get mighty uncomfortable.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"oh, cool. You like that stuff. Okay, we'll keep it so we can make some ad money."
What!?
YouTube/Google Video has ads?
I too, give them more credit. This was a probably very effective campaign designed to fine-tune the advertising mechanism just a bit more, which, despite the inconvenience, serves ultimately to increase revenue. It's one thing to watch a video, but to put everything else aside to preserve it when the notice that it will disappear appears, sends a mighty strong ''Like'' signal.
You missed my point AC.
Google chose ad revenue over copyright lawsuits!
Do that with Big Music and let the people share, say on a music annex of youtube, and ditch the lawsuit winter.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Only free "clouds" have this limitation. Paid "cloud" can be governed by SLAs and contracts
Home and small business "SLAs" for paid hosted services are best effort only, and the "contract" for home and small business tiers stipulates only that the provider must refund the service for the rest of the period.
TED.com has a brief but interesting video that explains how YouTube automates their search for copyright infringement, and how effective it is regardless of the quality of the submission. These automated systems can tag shaky video recorded onto mobile phones, for instance.
If the automated system isn't capable of evaluating the fair use rationale in the video's description, then it isn't a search for copyright infringement as much as a search for mere copying.
The problem with Vimeo is that it doesn't appear to want, say, videos about video games. If you developed the depicted game or obtained permission to post a video, it's "commercial use"; if not, it's copyright infringement. Start here; if you want more citations, I can provide them.
Google Video allowed very long videos, something around 2 hours. On YouTube, the maximum length is 15 minutes!
Given this, the important question is: how can we migrate our old favorite MST3k episodes that are still on Google Video?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Google made the announcement to see how much people really cared about that content. Obviously people do, so they're happy to migrate it, as the content will attract eyeballs and ads will be rendered. Google doesn't care about the content, they care if others care about the content.
The big question for me is this--
The download link only allows you to get the encoded FLV file. Does this mean they failed to store the originals? And if this is so, does that mean YouTube would be serving up the old fashioned h.263 FLV low quality encodes? If that's the case, we'd be much better off _not_ using the auto-move service, as YouTube encodes at much higher quality than Google Video did.
Or, did they just not want us to be sucking their bandwidth by allowing us to download the original footage, but they'll happily transfer it in-house over to YouTube?
Anyone have any pointers?
ZX2C4
You can download or remotely transfer Google Videos to Veevr online using this site: http://mozliwosci.com/savegooglevideos/
In any user moderated setting (i.e. users have control over what is posted and what is not) ultimately everything will be deleted. see: wikipedia.
You've been drinking waaaay too much of their Kool Aid if you think Google listens when the community speaks.
I dedicate this to Jason Scott - Archive.org!
I spent 4 days downloading the letter "G" - over 29GB of data. Spent 4 days rsync-ing it back up to the archive server. It's nice to know that a bit of history has been saved. I can't judge its merits - to me it was a bunch of silly videos, but who am I to judge...
You still have the same problem, if "dozens of volunteers from around the world" want to save the videos, Youtube is still a single point of failure. A private entity. They might decide to delete older non-viewed videos or distasteful videos, Or videos caught in one of their automated copyright filters wrongy, now or later. It's silly to wait to do such a thing if they truly cared, which I don't think they do.
It is just a moratory. It will happen.
Then people ask me why I keep downloading stuff, that everything is available online.
You can NEVER be sure that something that is accessible today will stay there.
So... less streaming and more downloading!