Google Video shutting down, disabling public downloads on April 29 | Hacker News Reader

Google Video shutting down, disabling public downloads on April 29

techcrunch.com

77 pointsivank37 comments

Archive Team is already on it; they're in #archiveteam and #googlegrape on EFNet. I don't think that their backup will be complete or highly available, though.

We've got a lot of things to do. People keep deleting shit on short notice.

Why not just ask for the disks from google?

Videos on GV are stored in some Google-proprietary database, so just shipping the physical disks probably isn't useful.

The spirit of his question stands: Why not ask for a database dump from Google?

This finally pushed me to move Simon Peyton Jones's presentation on How to Give a Good Research Talk from my Google Video account to YouTube. The original recording unfortunately has dodgy audio and video quality but it's still a gem of a talk. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1knJ6GIUr0

It's lucky they recently removed the 15 minute limit on my YouTube account. I would probably not have had the patience to chop up the video.

Why not automatically transfer all Google Video content to YouTube?

There is so much abandoned and bullshit video on there, it couldn't possibly be worth it.

>bullshit video on there

Yeah, that would never fit in at... youtube.

In all seriousness though, I thought google video had shut down years ago. It must have just been a phase in its shutdown, but I could have sworn it was already gone.

They disabled uploads a very long time ago, although I don't think it was announced as widely.

There were a lot of great longer videos that were hosted on Google Video leading up to their acquisition of Youtube. Now, I won't argue that the majority of the videos there are worthwhile, but it seems to me that a company whose self-professed goal is to "organize the world's information" really shouldn't be in the business of deleting large swaths of it. Google isn't exactly hurting for storage capacity; what harm could come from rolling the videos hosted there over to Youtube? It certainly couldn't hurt the average quality of Youtube.

I'd hope that the company that runs Google Books, that saw the value in ReCaptcha, that has cached the majority of the public-facing internet, that has mapped most regions of the world, and that provides satellite images of most of its surface wouldn't erase that data simply because they'd like to reuse the harddrives.

I have to agree. Two weeks notice? WTF, Google. The evil meter is dancing.

If you want people to trust you with their data, you should demonstrate more responsibility. And just because the hosting's been "free", doesn't mean you haven't made your pound of flesh off the advertising (speaking generally, at least).

Here's a thought: Shove it through YouTube. Heck, just keep the data around and convert and cache when an item is hit (those who really want it will wait out / return after the conversion). I suppose you need to be able to tie back to Video accounts for ownership, DMCA, etc. Still, there should be a better solution. And a couple of weeks' notice simply isn't fair. What if someone's tied up? On vacation? They're hosed.

Put it this way: Demonstrating yourself to be a source of "public" data loss, is rather bad PR.

They gave notice years ago that they were phasing it out. You haven't been able to upload anything in years. Frankly, I'm surprised it took them this long.

Well, then, I guess that compensates somewhat. Still, I'd suggest announcing the hard date 3 or more months in advance (I'd prefer 6). People become busy and complacent. And people may not quickly realize that a work they value has been abandoned by its original poster.

On the upside, they are "allowing" downloads. I guess I should acknowledge that as a serious positive.

I may have become sensitized by years of management that had similar attitudes towards changes. Push, push, push... until suddenly, we're abandoning this, NOW.

Different settings, but not entirely dissimilar feelings evoked.

Google announced this back in 2009, people have been able to download their video's since then.

Uploading was also stopped in 2009, so crying foul now is just unwarranted.

There might also be abandoned worthwhile content that we'll never get the chance to see ever again. I'm with those saying Google should transfer the videos automatically across to YouTube.

True, a lot of porn on it too.

The only problem I ran into was that there was no download link/button. Despite what their directions said, I currently have no way to download my old video because there's no link!

This works for me:

  python youtube-dl -t google-video-url

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

youtube-dl is great, and I find it to be well-maintained also; if ever it doesn't work, I just go see if there is a new version, which there invariably is, and which invariably works. It seems to have a decent feature set, too.

I've had problems with every other youtube downloader I've tried, and none with youtube-dl.

If you haven't used this already,

    youtube-dl -U

get_flash_videos will pull the video off almost any random URL.

http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/

I ran into the same problem. There is no download link. They should have an option to directly upload it to youtube.

UPDATE: Finally figured out a way to download the video, incase you don't see the download link. Find the "cid" from the "Edit Video Info>>" link and paste it in this url http://www.google.com/video/upload/DownloadVideo?cid=[video_...

This works great, thanks. Strangely, after you download, the link shows up.

one of two videos has a download link for me.

one uploaded in 2008 has a link but not the one from 2006

Does anyone know what happens to video uploaded through Blogger? Google says it puts it in Google Video but there is no options for me to download the video that has been uploaded. I'd email Google but... oh ya... They don't do support.

Just use keepvid.com or tubeminator.com to dw ur videos.

What a nuisance. It will take me an hour to transfer my stuff that I want to save. Er.

Even if everybody reposts their videos on youtube, the links to them will be broken. Google could avoid that by moving everything to youtube themselves and putting up redirects at the original urls.

For the love of god, please please please download as much as you can and post it on BitTorrent and Archive.org or some other site.

That's really frustrating. I don't think the Internet Archive has been saving copies of the videos, have they?

Respect.

Edit: not a good comment for HN. More: it was a great service, and it had a good run. And mad respect for Google for running it well but shutting it down gracefully.

I don't consider 13 days notice to be graceful. Imagine someone going on holidays for two weeks and coming back to find out their beloved video is lost forever.

Google isn't obligated to give a fair amount of notice but it'd be a nice thing to do. Don't be evil.

The TechCrunch article says people have until May 13 to download the videos. You just can't stream them after April 29.

Still, this is a pretty bad job on Google's part IMHO. More notice would have been good. (What if people were traveling or were sick for a month or something?) Plus Google should have an option to automatically transfer videos to Youtube.

Can't understand why Google's messing this up so badly.

In terms of public relations (when it comes to the "unwashed masses"), Google has always been a very reactive company. This is at the core of some of their most intractable problems / failure to perform (e.g. "social").

I see your point, but who is uploading videos to Google then deleting the source? These services are for sharing and streaming, not archiving.

I don't work for Google but I do work on large scale data hosting. When you shut a service down you have multiple phases. Step 1, stop capturing new data. Google Video did this years ago and anyone truly invested in the service knew what was up back then. Step 2, pick a date to stop serving existing data. Step 3, wait for a very long time for more requests to get data back. It is crazy how and why these trickle in years after the fact. Step 4, delete data. I bet Google wont actually delete data for a very long time if ever.

Maybe step 2 is aggressive, but in my experience 90 days notice doesn't make a difference. Nobody does anything until the last few days if ever. You just have to draw a line in the sand.

It is very hard to shut a service down with any sort of usage, let alone Google scale usage. But very important to do from time to time. This is what I respect.

I saw the first word of your comment, and thought, "downvote"

Then I read the edit and thought, "downvote, then punch this guy in the mouth"

Hey, you know what's respectful? Moving the videos to youtube. Or emailing download links to their users. Or giving them more than thirteen days notice. What are you, a MBA? How can you possibly consider this a good decision?

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