A free thinker in the Heartland...

Monday, June 19, 2006

Download Internet Video

So you see a funny video on YouTube, and you want to download it. How? Well Cnet shows a way you can:

Two services run by two people in Australia are giving people new ways to access and use video content from sites like YouTube and Google Video, and copyright holders may well find themselves up in arms about it.

Known as Peekvid and Keepvid, the sister services are designed, respectively, to aggregate and index copyrighted YouTube content, and allow users to rip content from YouTube, Google Video and other services to their hard drives.

Thus, though YouTube prohibits anyone except legitimate rights holders--such as NBC Universal, EMI Records and many others--from uploading copyrighted content to its site, such content does get posted illegally, and these sister services make it possible to easily view, and download, a wide variety of such content. A recent survey turned up clips including World Cup highlights, Beatles and 2Pac Shakur music videos, episodes of "Seinfeld," an episode of "Lost" and dozens of other TV shows and music videos.

"None of the videos on Peekvid are hosted by us," Joshua, one of two people in western Australia who run the service and sister site Keepvid, said in an instant message interview. "We do not condone uploading of copyright(ed) material by illegitimate copyright holders. Peekvid is simply a more organized index of some of YouTube's videos."

I love kitten videos as much as the next guy, but I dunno if I want to download any. But hey, just so you know if you were so inclined.