Video Downloads?

Are there any plans to make the videos available for download instead of just streaming from youtube.

I'd pay for this functionality.

Right now I'm watching the videos with the HTML5 player which allows me to watch them at 1.5x speed, but only at 720p.
You can easily download videos from youtube (or from twitch) yourself by using youtube-dl.

For example - this command will download 1080p video + 256k audio for day 35:
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youtube-dl -f 137+141 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5-oY8EHkzw

For different quality video/audio numbers run "youtube-dl -F url".

To download all videos just pass channel url (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaTznQhurW5AaiYPbhEA-KA) in argument.

Edited by Mārtiņš Možeiko on
Thanks for the reply, I'll try that. I'd still pay for 1080p video that's not compressed through youtube though.
Wow... 1.5x speed? I have a hard time following Casey at 1x when he gets going.

I think it's a limit of the HTML5 version. Normal use with Flash (or Chrome) and I get 1080p all the time.

If I'm not mistaken YouTube does not allow videos to be downloaded. Having Casey provide that feature separately would be extremely expensive (1.5 hour 1080 video is not small, and multiply that by the days available and you get a huge footprint).
TheMasterGoblin
Wow... 1.5x speed? I have a hard time following Casey at 1x when he gets going.


I stop and rewind or slow down when I get lost, but I love watching lectures at 1.5x speed because it forces me to pay very close attention, and my mind doesn't wander.
I'm also not coding along at that speed--I code after watching the video.


TheMasterGoblin

Having Casey provide that feature separately would be extremely expensive (1.5 hour 1080 video is not small, and multiply that by the days available and you get a huge footprint).


That's why I suggested charging a fee to access the download links. If you use something like Amazon S3 it wouldn't cost much at all. They charge about $0.03 per GB for storage and $0.09 per GB downloaded.

You'd still have to use some compression to make this viable, but not to the extent that youtube compresses 1080p video.

Edited by Seth Brown on
While charging for the video downloads would be an option, it still would be expensive over time and would require work (setting it up, doing the paywall, etc).

Let's take a look at how much it would cost just to host the files.

Each video is probably 1 to 3 GB in size. There are 35 videos right now (and that's going to end in the hundreds) which means it's in the neighborhood of 52GB or so (1.5GB / video assumed) right now. That's only $1.5 / month for now, in a year it will be over $11 / month.

So far, not so bad. Now lets look at bandwidth.

If they were made for download, a lot of people would probably take advantage (unless there was a pay wall like you suggested).

Let's say each person pays and download all of the available videos (keep in mind this is only for possible paying down loaders, not accounting for if they were free which I would guess would up the down loaders by a magnitude).

Assuming the average 1.5GB file size as before, you'll end up paying $472.5 for that month (with 100 down loaders - the number here doesn't matter for this calculation, any number ends up about the same).

So each person would need to pay $5 / month to cover bare hosting and servering costs (this of course does not assume or calculate for new videos or multiple downloads of the existing set).

It's getting up there, but so far not so bad.

But lets check after one year.

Let's take the same 100 people and the same 1.5GB download, but now with 260 downloads available (5 videos per week for a year). That translates to $3315 for that month (because we move up one tier in pricing). In this case each person would need to pay close to $35 for access (as before with 100 down loaders - the number here doesn't matter for this calculation, any number ends up about the same).

Not to put a downer on the idea since I would love such an option (I would pay for it as well). I just don't think it's feasible for Casey who already gives us 2 hours a night, 5 nights a week (not including time on the forums or other maintenance) for free.
I would love to make the videos available for download more directly than via a YouTube downloader, but I do not know how to do this effectively. Since a new video is added every night, making a BitTorrent doesn't seem like it would really work? I basically just need a BitTorrent equivalent that allows you to keep adding files seamlessly :)

Similarly, I would prefer it if the show were watchable live on a service that didn't show advertising, but I don't know how to do that, either. I tried to set up a dual-streaming thing such that it would stream to both HitBox and Twitch simultaneously, as per instructions on the internet, but it didn't work :( I also don't know if HitBox actually works without ads or not.

Anyway, Twitch does seem like users can pay for the service and then not have ads, so I'm OK with that as long as it stays that way! I just want to make sure there is an ad-free option always.

- Casey
You could use BitTorrent Sync for that. It's like Dropbox, but without server. Basically put all videos in one folder and publish read-only key/hash to everybody. Then whoever adds this folder key/hash to its BTSync instance will download all videos. Downloading will happen from all peers simultaneously (same way how torrents work), not only you. When new video will be available simply put it into this folder and it will be available for everybody pretty instantly.

Edited by Mārtiņš Možeiko on
BitTorrent Sync would work and torrents would be a good idea.
As for torrents, I would recommend just creating a new one for each file which should be pretty quick.

After that maybe a compiled list of each logical grouping of videos would work.

A compiled video list, similar to what you do with the code, would probably be too big to download realistically over time (especially for new downloaders).
I'm using jdownloader2 to get a local 1080p copy from youtube. It automatically installs ffmpeg, if needed, to merge audio and video stream. This works very well for me. It also can download hole playlists.
To add the chapter timecodes from the episode guide, I'm using a small tool named drax.
Including day 35, it's about 40GB.
OK that looks excellent - I will see about setting that up. I don't have much time at the moment but I will definitely put it on the to-do list!!

Thanks,
- Casey
I download from YT using a FireFox extention, and Noscript and Adblock. No problemo.
learc83
Right now I'm watching the videos with the HTML5 player which allows me to watch them at 1.5x speed, but only at 720p.


That's strange - I can play 1080p and have all the speed options available (up to 2x). This is on PC Chrome. Maybe it's dependent on hardware?
I use a little bash script to download from youtube: ~/hmh-get.sh:
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#!/bin/bash

~/youtubedl "$@" -f bestvideo+bestaudio
~/ytdl-cl

Where ~/ytdl-cl is a tiny utility I wrote to clean up after youtubedl (it leaves video and audio streams): https://github.com/itsuart/ytdl-cleanup