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KeepVid Site No Longer Allows Users To 'Keep' Videos (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: For many years, KeepVid has been a prime destination for people who wanted to download videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Facebook, Vimeo, and dozens of other sites. The web application was free and worked without any hassle. This was still the case earlier this month when the site advertised itself as follows: "KeepVid Video Downloader is a free web application that allows you to download videos from sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch.Tv, Vimeo, Dailymotion and many more." However, a few days ago the site radically changed its course. While the motivation is unknown at the time, KeepVid took its popular video download service offline without prior notice. Today, people can no longer use the KeepVid site to download videos. On the contrary, the site warns that using video download and conversion tools might get people in trouble. "Video downloading from the Internet will become more and more difficult, and KeepVid encourages people to download videos via the correct and legal ways," the new KeepVid reads. The site now lists several alternative options to enjoy videos and music, including Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and Pandora.
The site's content is straight out of Google Translate engine and smacks of someone in a foreign country being hit with a lawsuit and putting up this content to satisfy the terms of the settlement. Goodbye, keepvid.com, as you get forgotten in the search rankings.
Well fuck.
Beware of the Leopard.
Just use youtube-dl or a browser extension.
it really sounds like they got hit with a big threat from someone (like youtube) and were given the no-choice-choice of 100% compliance with their demands or facing a bankrupting lawsuit. The typical demand is:
1. take down your service immediately
2. never come back
3. don't tell anyone who we are
"in exchange, we won't sue you into oblivion"
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It can download from most major sites and even a few of the smaller ones. It let's you pick what format the video is (or only the audio from YouTube videos if you prefer to listen to them as podcasts).
Otherwise I can just as easily Inspect Element on video streams and get the direct URL of it to download.
No you can't. Most major platforms have layers and layers of obfuscating javascript, and the actual resource URL isn't exposed in the DOM, and neither is the key you need to get a working response from the server.
And many platforms have obnoxious DRM on top of that.
This would be a specialized proxy server, an extremely "niche" use where I haven't seen obvious instructions on how to setup. The steps involved are also the scary "OMG, you're becoming vulnerable to MitM attacks" despite the process actually being safe. Plenty of obstacles as well. 1. No easy toggle for switching to and from a proxy server. There's extensions/utilities for this, but you have to find them. 2. HTTPS requires you to create and install both a root and intermediate certificate. (Which basically shows that HTTPS simply just prevents casual interception - any skilled malware author could trivially intercept anything.) 3. Current video sites download the stuff in piecemeal (either DRM style, or as a means to save bandwidth). You need special software to patch them together again. 4. (If running a caching proxy) The HTTP standard document (some random RFC) is no longer the comprehensive standard. Any trivial mistake (including something not obvious in the origianl document) confuses the browser. None of this stops pirates or experienced programmers, only casual users.
It is a bad idea to rely on web sites such as keepvid that are full of ads and incomprehensible scripts that do god-knows-what.
It is a much better idea to instead use a free and open-source video-downloader such as youtube-dl or quvi.
And if the maintainers/developers of youtube-dl or quvi decide to discontinue the project and "encourage people to download videos via the correct and legal ways", then you can always fork the code. That's the beauty of free/libre software.
This situation is a perfect example of why Richard Stallman warned about "Service as a Software Substitute (SASS)". i.e. websites that offer a "service", that should instead be done by a software program running locally on your computer, fully under your control.
Been using both of them for a while now. Highly recommended.
Download audio of talks and audiobooks on Youtube, and put it on the phone to listen in my car during my commute.
I don't know how WW3 will be fought, but video war X will be fought with a vintage analog video recorder aimed at a monitor.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"Keepvid" becomes "Give up Vid"
aaaaaaa
youtube-dl works well for youtube and many other sites.
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl
It's not KeepVid, but it's pretty darn good if you like command line interfaces.