Download and Buy Videos from YouTube

YouTube includes a new section for "My Videos": a list of purchased videos. A YouTube help page has more details about the new feature:

You have the option of downloading and storing your favorite Partner videos and watching these videos even without an internet connection. To download Partner video:

1. Find the video you'd like to download.
2. Below the video's play bar in the lower left hand corner, you'll see a 'Download' button.
3. Click the 'Download' button to indicate that you'd like to download the video.

Videos are available to download in the MP4 format and some of them can be downloaded for free and they're even licensed as Public Domain or Creative Commons. An example of channel that offers Creative Commons-licensed video downloads is Stanford University. If the download requires payment, you'll be directed to a Google Checkout page where you'll find the price of the video.


Google Video had a similar option that has been discontinued in 2007, but it used DRM and it required to be online in order to authenticate your credentials.

Related:
Greasemonkey script for downloading YouTube videos

Update: YouTube's blog has more details. The downloading options are a test for US partners and there are 5 licenses for the downloaded videos:

* Personal, non-commercial use
* Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works)
* Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike)
* Creative Commons (Attribution)
* Public Domain (no copyright protection)

YouTube Feed View

There's a new option to customize YouTube's homepage when you are logged in: the feed view. YouTube orders chronologically the videos from all the other sections you've selected: featured videos, promoted videos (which can't be disabled), videos from your subscriptions, recommendations, friend activity.


Unfortunately, YouTube's promoted videos can't be filtered, recommended videos constantly change and there's no actual feed generated by YouTube. You can obtain a feed that aggregates the latest videos from your subscriptions using a Yahoo Pipe.

YouTube shows a similar recent activity view in your channel, but you need to explicitly make it public. The activity view can show your latest ratings, recent comments, video uploads and subscriptions.

YouTube Tests Video Downloads

Yes, you can download YouTube videos using hundreds of sites, scripts, extensions and applications and that's because YouTube's interface didn't offer a download option. Initially, the only format available for download was FLV, which was only intended to be played using Adobe Flash. Then YouTube started to test higher-quality versions for videos, including MP4 (H264 with AAC audio). Now you can export all YouTube videos as MP4 and it would be trivial for YouTube to add this option, which is already available at Google Video.

YouTube's terms of use still insist that the videos can only be accessed for streaming, "a contemporaneous digital transmission of an audiovisual work via the Internet from the YouTube Service to a user's device in such a manner that the data is intended for real-time viewing and not intended to be copied, stored, permanently downloaded, or redistributed by the user".

But things are starting to change: the videos from Barrack Obama's YouTube channel ChangeDotGov have a small download link below the player. "YouTube is rolling this out slowly, initially with content that aspires to be consistent with principles of open government. I'm told it will be offered more generally. In any case, it is an important development. There have always been hacks for slurping down YouTube videos. But it is a valuable step that YouTube encourages and supports this sharing," notes Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University.

Why would you download videos? To be able to watch them without having an Internet connection, to download them faster using download accelerators like Flashget or Free Download Manager, to use some of the content in your videos or to have an offline version just in case the video is no longer available at YouTube.

The Search Box from YouTube's Embedded Player

You probably noticed that YouTube's embedded player started to include a search box when you pause a video and when you move the mouse at the top of a video.

While the implementation is probably too aggressive, the search box is a good way to find other similar videos on YouTube. The player shows 6 results at a time, but you can navigate using the two arrows and you can view other thumbnails from the video before selecting it. To go back to the list of search results, click on the Search button.


The search box sits there, at the top of the video, to show that there is so much more to explore and this video is just the starting point. There's a small YouTube inside each embedded player.

YouTube Changes

There are many changes going on at YouTube and many of them aren't likely to improve user experience. Let's start with the search box that is displayed before playing a video in an embedded player. It was a great feature when it was displayed at the end of a video, but now you'll see it before playing the video and every time you pause it.

There's a parameter that can be added to your embedded videos if you don't want to display the search box: edit the code and add &showsearch=0 after http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID&hl=en&fs=1.


YouTube updated the header and there's a new overlay that shows the duration of a video over the thumbnail. YouTube's blog says that the thumbnails will no longer be selected from the 25/50/75 points of the video's index, but they'll be selected algorithmically to minimize the impact of manipulative thumbnails.


Another change, which caused considerable uproar, is demoting videos that include suggestive content and profanity. "Videos that are considered sexually suggestive, or that contain profanity, will be algorithmically demoted on our 'Most Viewed,' 'Top Favorited,' and other browse pages. The classification of these types of videos is based on a number of factors, including video content and descriptions." Probably YouTube didn't like that the list of popular videos usually looked like this (NSFW). Users didn't understand YouTube's goal and they started to call the change "censorship".

"Algorithmically demoted... That's a nice way to make a video that is top favorited or most viewed not be in that category anymore for no apparent reasons. Angry parents and other narrow-minded people shouldn't get through with putting the pressure on youtube. Where's the freedom of saying or expressing what you want?," commented dirtbiker100890. "One of the main reasons I watch videos on youtube is because people have been able to say what ever they want, for the most part. If the youtube staff starts censoring everything then I won't have much of a reason to come here anymore," thinks GeneralCrazyIvan.

YouTube shouldn't demote a video because it includes suggestive content or profanity, but only if it uses misleading thumbnails or descriptions to artificially increase popularity. YouTube could include a preference that filters suggestive content and profanity, so the videos will be excluded from search results and the list of popular videos.

"Videos featuring sexually explicit content like real sex acts are not allowed. Other content like nudity and dramatized or implied sexual conduct may be considered sexually suggestive depending on whether or not it is intended or designed to arouse viewers," explains a help page.

From now on, videos that include suggestive content will be filtered from the lists of popular videos and they'll be age-restricted, so you'll have to confirm your age before viewing them.

More Space for YouTube Videos

YouTube's Google Video-ization continues by using more space for the player and less space for the sidebar. YouTube changed the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9, generally used for high-definition TV. Since the videos aren't yet converted to a widescreen format, you'll see an annoying pillar box effect.

"The pillar box effect occurs in widescreen video displays when black bars (mattes or masking) are placed on the sides of the image. It becomes necessary when film or video that was not originally designed for widescreen is shown on a widescreen display, or a narrower widescreen image is displayed within a wider aspect ratio."


{ Thanks, Mark. }

YouTube Tests Even Higher Quality Videos

YouTube already provides an option to view higher quality versions for some videos and you can also append "&fmt=18" to the URLs for the other videos. If you add "&fmt=22", some YouTube videos are now available at an even higher quality, which makes the full screen view a very useful option. Compare:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY (standard format - mono, resolution: 320x180)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=18 (stereo, resolution: 480x270)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=22 (new format - stereo, resolution: 1280x720)

To embed a higher quality version of a video, replace "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID" with "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" or "http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" in YouTube's embeddable code.



Unfortunately, the new format (fmt=22) is not available for too many videos, probably because it's still experimental and most people upload compressed videos.

{ via Wired }

More YouTube Ads

Two years after being acquired by Google, YouTube still hasn't figured out how to monetize the site. "We believe the best products are coming out this year. And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying. But we have a number — and, of course, Google is an innovative place," said Eric Schmidt in August.

One of the new products replicates Google's search ads and adjusts them to a video site. "Sponsored Videos is a self-serve advertising platform that will allow you to promote your video to the audience you are interested in reaching in an easy, effective, democratic, and affordable way. Then, when people use YouTube to search for videos, YouTube will display the most relevant, compelling videos alongside the search results," explains YouTube Blog. Any company or YouTube user from the US can promote his channel or one his videos next to the search results.

Since YouTube controls the search results and hosts the videos, it can provide more measurable results. YouTube can track if the user watched the entire video, if he subscribed to the channel or clicked on the link to the advertiser's homepage.


Another part of YouTube's monetization strategy is expanding the in-video ads to embeddable players. "To date, YouTube has only run ads against partner videos on YouTube itself, and with people viewing millions of embedded YouTube videos every day, this meant that partners were not generating revenue from their views outside YouTube.com. But now, YouTube partners will be able to capitalize on their popularity across the internet and generate revenue from their content no matter where their video lives," informs AdSense Blog. Until now, many YouTube partners disabled the option to embed videos because they couldn't make money from this distribution channel. This change will only affect 4% of the videos uploaded to YouTube, but the percentage of views is much more significant.


The text ads displayed at the bottom of the video can be minimized, but they could cover an important part of a video (for example: annotations, captions) and they're distracting. Most of them link to web pages, but there are some ads that open a new video inside the player.

Google needs to make YouTube profitable and it's nice to see that the ads are often relevant, they don't interrupt videos and they don't make you wait.

Find YouTube Playlists

The option to find playlists is back at YouTube. Playlists are a great way to group related videos which can be later played one after another.

YouTube shows three popular videos from each playlist and it lets you restrict the results to a certain category, like Education, Music or Sports.


Creating a playlist is easy and, by default, each playlist is public and can be embedded in a web page. Instead of posting 3 or 4 related YouTube videos, create a playlist and use the code provided by YouTube to add it to your web page: you'll include a single player and the visitors will only need to click on the "play" button once.

YouTube Highlights Previously Viewed Videos

If you are logged in, YouTube saves a list of all the videos you watch, but there's no interface that displays them. When you perform a search, YouTube shows a label next to the videos you've previously viewed.



Google shows a similar label next to the search results you've already visited from Google search and you can find the number of visits and the date of the most recent visit. The difference is that Google shows your search history and makes it searchable.

Link Within a YouTube Video

Two weeks ago, I posted how to embed a YouTube and make it start from a certain point. Now you can do the same thing for YouTube's watch pages: just append #t=XXmYYs to a YouTube URL, where XX is the number of minutes and YY is the number of seconds. For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBNDYggyesc#t=24m30s.


Google Video has a similar way to link within a video: add #XXmYYs to a URL. YouTube implemented another feature from Google Video: when you mention a time value in a comment, YouTube automatically creates a link that takes you to that sequence.

It seems that YouTube gradually adds all the features from Google Video: captions, MP4 downloads (not yet linked from the interface), theater view, but Google Video doesn't receive too much attention. I wonder if Google will disable the video uploading feature from Google Video and migrate all the existing videos to YouTube.

{ via TechCrunch }

Search from YouTube's Player

At the end of a video, YouTube's embedded player displays a list of related videos. If they're not very relevant or you have a specific video in mind that you want to see, use the new search box and type a query. To see more results, click on the right arrow.

Unfortunately, you can't go back to the list of results after selecting a video and the related videos displayed at the bottom aren't updated, but this is yet another step towards a more interactive player.


Here's a video where you can see the new feature in action (wait until the video ends or click on the up arrow button and select the only option that's available):


In other YouTube news, the homepage is more customizable: you can select how many videos are displayed in each module and change the layout to list view or grid. There are two new modules that show statistical information about your uploaded videos: Insight Map and Insight Chart.

{ Thanks, Phil. }

Embed a Part of a YouTube Video

If you want to embed a YouTube video that starts to become interesting somewhere in the middle, there's a simple way to skip the boring part. YouTube's embedded player has a parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that should be skipped before starting to play the video. Here's how you should edit the code: append &start=[number of seconds from the start of the video] to both URLs.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/abcdefghijk&hl=en&fs=1&start=15" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

For example, the video below includes some excerpts from Google Chrome's launch, but I skipped to the last part, when Sergey Brin answers some interesting questions.


Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't provide an option to link to a part of the video, but you can still use the embedded player:
http://www.youtube.com/v/w8oPEJiCqi4&start=249&autoplay=1,
where the autoplay parameter is necessary to automatically start the video.

Since there's no end parameter, you can try Splicd, a site that uses YouTube's API to isolate a part of a video.

Related:
YouTube embedded player parameters

YouTube Links to Online Music Stores

YouTube started to add links to iTunes and Amazon MP3 for music videos from EMI Music and Universal Music. "Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products -- like songs and video games -- related to the content they're watching on the site," announces Google Blog.

YouTube hopes to add this option for other types of videos and to offer an alternative way to monetize videos. "Our vision is to help partners across all industries -- from music, to film, to print, to TV -- offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos."

For now, the links are only available in the US, but they will be added internationally if this experiment turns out to be a success. YouTube shows ads only next to the videos uploaded or claimed by its partners, which account for 4% of the videos hosted by YouTube.

YouTube Theater View

YouTube shows a new option for long videos: a theater view that enlarges the player and fades out the rest of the page. Randall Munroe's talk at Google and Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford are two examples of feature length videos that should display the new option.


You can restrict YouTube's search results to feature length videos by appending &longform=1:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=site:youtube.com&longform=1

It's not clear how YouTube filters feature length videos, but most of them are from the Authors@Google series, Standford University, Carnegie Mellon University and Vancouver Film Studios.

If you want a YouTube interface that looks more like Google Video, try the YouTube Googler Greasemonkey script.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

More Advanced Search Options for YouTube

YouTube added some new options that allow you to filter search results by type. You can restrict the results to videos uploaded by YouTube partners, videos that have annotations or closed captions. There's also an option to restrict the results to feature length videos, but it doesn't seem to work yet.

Use the "partner videos" restriction to get official videos, annotations could be used for additional explanations or interactivity, while closed captions allow you to search inside the text of a video. The closed captioning features has been recently added to YouTube, so you won't find too many subtitled videos.


YouTube's interface doesn't let you combine the restrictions, but you can manually add parameters:

http://www.youtube.com/results?closed_captions=1&annotations=1&search_query=site:youtube.com (videos that have both annotations and closed captions)

http://www.youtube.com/results?partner=1&closed_captions=1&search_query=site:youtube.com (partner videos with closed captions)

Add Captions to YouTube Videos

YouTube added support for closed captioning, a feature that was already available at Google Video. If you edit one of your videos, you can click on the "Captions and subtitles" section and upload a captions file.

"Captions and subtitles make videos accessible to a wider audience by allowing folks who can not otherwise understand the audio track to follow along, especially those who are hard-of-hearing or speak other languages. Captions are in the same language as the video's audio track. Subtitles are in a different language," explains YouTube's help center.

For now, YouTube supports two formats: SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT). "To add several captions to a video, simply upload multiple files. If you want to include foreign subtitles in multiple languages, upload a separate file for each language. There are over 120 languages to choose from and you can add any title you want for each caption. If a video includes captions, you can activate them by clicking the menu button located on the bottom right of the video player."

YouTube Blog mentions some examples of videos that already use captions: a clip from Top Gear, a Japanese animation and a Physics lecture from MIT.


To turn off captions or select a different language, mouse over the small arrow button. You can either click on the "CC" option to deactivate the caption or select one of the other languages, if they are available. Embedded videos won't show the captions, at least for now.

Last month, Google showed a demo of a speech-to-text technology that automatically captions videos, but this doesn't work well for any kind of video. Even if the captions are provided by users or they are automatically generated, they will improve the quality of search results.

YouTube Toolbar for Playlists

YouTube shows a small toolbar at the bottom of the page that lets you manage the videos from a playlist, more like the controls from a media player. The toolbar has options for pausing and muting the active video, buttons for playing the next video from the playlist and for automatically playing videos. All of these options were already available in the sidebar, but the new toolbar makes them more visible and it follows you in any YouTube page.



The excellent music sites The Hype Machine and thesixtyone have similar toolbars, but I'm not sure if the concept works well for videos. I can only see the new feature in Firefox, so I assume this is yet another experimental feature.

YouTube Uploader Powered by Gears

You can now upload videos larger than 100 MB to YouTube without installing a dedicated software. YouTube started to use Gears to upload videos.

The latest version of Gears introduces some new features that make manipulating large files so much easier.

Gears now makes uploading large and multiple files on the web much easier, giving you the primitives to roll a resumable uploader, which means hopefully we can see custom desktop uploaders go away soon. (...) Another cool new feature is the Blob API. Unlike strings, blobs let you reference arbitrary binary data — a first for JavaScript! Therefore, blobs can more naturally represent things like files and images, and they can be passed around efficiently. (...) We have also extended the Desktop API with a new method, openFiles(), which allows users to select multiple files of a particular content type, and then returns them as blobs for easy uploading or worker processing.

The multi-video uploader is useful if you want to upload more than one video from a single video and if some of your videos have more than 100 MB. "Each video can be up to 10 minutes in length and up to 1GB in size. These videos will be available in My Videos after they have finished processing. It may take 30 minutes or more for extremely large files to appear on your My Videos page."

{ Thanks, Hebbet. }

Translate YouTube's Search Results

YouTube tests a new option that translates the search results into your language using Google Translate. Now that you can independently select the interface language, it would be nice if the user-generated content was available in the same language.

YouTube didn't translate the titles and descriptions for all the videos, but it decided to use Google Translate's JavaScript API to perform the translations when they are needed, much like Twitter Search. If you click on "translate results into my language", YouTube sets a preference and all the search results will have titles and descriptions in your language, assuming it's supported by Google Translate.

The translation API offered by Google can be easily integrated in web applications, especially that it can now preserve HTML markup. I expect to see a lot of applications that take advantage of the API, from webmail services like Gmail to browsers and IM clients.



In other machine translation news, Google Dictionary has a new interface and it now supports more language pairs. There's also a section for definitions found on the web.


{ Thanks, Aleksandr. }