I wanted to edit a video I found on youtube. Since I have a Macbook Pro with iMovie Editing software I decided to start there.
Naturally when I don’t know something I Google for the answers. There were a couple of posts that lead me to some tutorials on youtube.
Approach #1 is to download RealPlayer SP with RealPlayer Downloader and RealPlayer Converter. Which I did, installed all this stuff on my MacBook and downloaded the Movie clip.
Result: the downloaded clip just played black. (No this isn’t a typo. The resultant video was BLACK for the entire clip) I installed a newer version of Flash player which did not help. Finally I uninstalled all the realvideo stuff.
Approach #2 Was to d/l another program called mytube widget. I took at look at the downloaded files and asked myself if I wanted to install all this “junk” on my Mac. I thought there has to be another way.
Approach #3 At this point I thought perhaps I can do this on a Linux box since there are several at home here. Turns out you can easily install youtube-dl
(Debian and its derivatives # apt-get install youtube-dl)
Fedora # yum install youtube-dl
Mac (Do this in terminal)
# sudo curl https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2014.03.12/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
# sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
This apparently will work in Windows also but you need to download a Python interpreter. This comes with OSX and Linuxes.
This is a python script. So all you do is
a) Get the youtube URL that you want. The easiest way is to startup a browser and copy the youtube URL.
b) % youtube-dl -F “<desiredyoutubevideourl>
It will list a number formats . Here’s an example:
171 webm audio only DASH webm audio , audio@ 48k (worst)
140 m4a audio only DASH audio , audio@128k
160 mp4 192p DASH video
133 mp4 240p DASH video
17 3gp 176×144
36 3gp 320×240
5 flv 400×240
43 webm 640×360
18 mp4 640×360 (best)
Now just pick the format you want and download the video, E.G.
% usr/local/bin/youtube-dl -f 18 “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8M6S8EKbnU”
Now you get your video in the format you want you can just redisplay it or edit it.
I suppose that Mac (and Windows) people are just afraid of the command line. I believe it far easier to run a simple script in a terminal than to have several megabyte downloads and converters that don’t even work in a GUI. But of course YMMV.
Oh yes. My edited video. I was trying to make a point on why Microsoft likes developers. You can see the results here