6 ms·

Google Video shutting down, disabling public downloads on April 29

77 points by ivank 16y ago

ivank 16y ago
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.
- chronomex 16y ago
  We've got a lot of things to do. People keep deleting shit on short notice.
- light3 16y ago
  Why not just ask for the disks from google?
  - sp332 16y ago
    Videos on GV are stored in some Google-proprietary database, so just shipping the physical disks probably isn't useful.
    - patrickyeon 16y ago
      The spirit of his question stands: Why not ask for a database dump from Google?
risotto 16y ago
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.
- pufuwozu 16y ago
  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.
  - davidmurphy 16y ago
    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.
    - pasbesoin 16y ago
      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").
  - risotto 16y ago
    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.
- sbierwagen 16y ago
  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?
yuhong 16y ago
Why not automatically transfer all Google Video content to YouTube?
- risotto 16y ago
  There is so much abandoned and bullshit video on there, it couldn't possibly be worth it.
  - bxr 16y ago
    >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.
    - qntm 16y ago
      They disabled uploads a very long time ago, although I don't think it was announced as widely.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    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.
    - pasbesoin 16y ago
      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.
geuis 16y ago
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!
- ivank 16y ago
  This works for me: python youtube-dl -t google-video-url http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/ http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/
  - PostOnce 16y ago
    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.
    - copper 16y ago
      If you haven't used this already, youtube-dl -U
  - rubashov 16y ago
    get_flash_videos will pull the video off almost any random URL. http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/ http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/
- vivekjishtu 16y ago
  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_cid] http://www.google.com/video/upload/DownloadVideo?cid=[video_...
  - 16y ago
psykotic 16y ago
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 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.
omouse 16y ago
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.
kragen 16y ago
That's really frustrating. I don't think the Internet Archive has been saving copies of the videos, have they?
laujen 16y ago
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.
- HelloBeautiful 16y ago
  Just use keepvid.com or tubeminator.com to dw ur videos.
mark_l_watson 16y ago
What a nuisance. It will take me an hour to transfer my stuff that I want to save. Er.
DennisP 16y ago
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.

77 points by ivank 16y ago

ivank 16y ago

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.

chronomex 16y ago
We've got a lot of things to do. People keep deleting shit on short notice.
light3 16y ago
Why not just ask for the disks from google?
- sp332 16y ago
  Videos on GV are stored in some Google-proprietary database, so just shipping the physical disks probably isn't useful.
  - patrickyeon 16y ago
    The spirit of his question stands: Why not ask for a database dump from Google?

risotto 16y ago

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.

pufuwozu 16y ago
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.
- davidmurphy 16y ago
  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.
  - pasbesoin 16y ago
    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").
- risotto 16y ago
  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.
sbierwagen 16y ago
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?

yuhong 16y ago

Why not automatically transfer all Google Video content to YouTube?

risotto 16y ago
There is so much abandoned and bullshit video on there, it couldn't possibly be worth it.
- bxr 16y ago
  >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.
  - qntm 16y ago
    They disabled uploads a very long time ago, although I don't think it was announced as widely.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  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.
  - pasbesoin 16y ago
    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.

geuis 16y ago

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!

ivank 16y ago
This works for me: python youtube-dl -t google-video-url http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/ http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/
- PostOnce 16y ago
  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.
  - copper 16y ago
    If you haven't used this already, youtube-dl -U
- rubashov 16y ago
  get_flash_videos will pull the video off almost any random URL. http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/ http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/
vivekjishtu 16y ago
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_cid] http://www.google.com/video/upload/DownloadVideo?cid=[video_...
- 16y ago

psykotic 16y ago

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 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.

omouse 16y ago

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.

kragen 16y ago

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

laujen 16y ago

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.

HelloBeautiful 16y ago
Just use keepvid.com or tubeminator.com to dw ur videos.

mark_l_watson 16y ago

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

DennisP 16y ago

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.