Convert YouTube videos to mp3's without the suck | Hacker News Reader

Convert YouTube videos to mp3's without the suck

dirpy.com

11 pointsvekt6 comments

Now, since you mention "the suck" in the headline this comment will be in the same vain.

Transcoding a lossy source to another lossy file is the suck. In terms of audio you cannot suck much more. What you should be doing is demux the audio from the video and if the user wants to cut it, do so in a lossless way.

Youtube seems to use AAC. Depending on your audience you might probably simply serve that ("iPod format"). But then you would lose the keyword "mp3".

"like CD quality at 128kbps 44.1khz stereo". Any remotely quality loving person will wince at this. Not only is 128kbps MP3 not CD quality, since you transcoded from AAC it is even worse than a normal 128kbps MP3.

Thanks so much for your feedback.

Audio quality is a big issue, and one that can indeed be improved upon.

The 128kbps mp3 listed as CD quality was inaccurate and has been fixed to no longer be listed as such. Thanks for pointing that out.

As for a lossy to lossy conversion, if the end user would like the file as an mp3 ( which the vast majority do ), then re-encoding is the forced route. That said, you're not the first to suggest adding the capability to download the original demuxed AAC audio stream ( where applicable ), and just such a feature is in the pipeline to be included in a later release :). And if curious, the lower quality YouTube streams ( formats 5 and 6 ) have mp3 audio streams while the higher quality videos ( formats 34, 18, 22, etc ) have AAC audio streams.

But the audio quality on YouTube is frequently iffy to begin with, where for many videos their audio streams are already n-th generation re-encodings of some original file. Thus, if one is an audiophile or would like a truly 'high quality' version of some audio, YouTube probably isn't the best place to go to begin with.

Thanks again so much for your feedback; and please don't hesitate to voice any other ideas, suggestions, or concerns!

For offline use (in whatever sense that term might be applicable to YouTube) I like clive for ripping the full video and ffmpeg for extracting the audio stream. Does your service use any such tools under the hood?

clive: http://clive.sourceforge.net/

  ffmpeg -i "$in" -acodec libmp3lame -vn "$out"

Dirpy runs a transcoding platform written using a bunch of libraries that include libavcodec, libavformat, and libavutil, which are some of the same libraries that help drive ffmpeg.

For a more detailed list of a number of the open source software projects in use, check out the Dirpy about page.

   http://dirpy.com/about.py

And of course a huge thanks to all the contributors to open source software the universe over. And thanks for your question :).

This is an interesting idea, and it looks like it's pretty well executed so far too.

Bug:

I tried entering a youtube video url and the video loaded on the right, but I got a message about it not being found on the left. I refreshed the page since I saw that the video Id was in the query string, and it worked when I did that.

Ya, that seems to be a bug concerning a small subset of videos. It will be looked into.

Thanks for the feedback, and glad you got it working :).

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