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What's the point of these downloading-webservices, anyway? From my (perhaps naive) point of view, saving a media stream to disk is a better task much better sui
by vog 14y ago
What's the point of these downloading-webservices, anyway? From my (perhaps naive) point of view, saving a media stream to disk is a better task much better suited for client software.
Nowadays, there are pretty good tools for many operating systems. In the future those might turn into browser extensions, or even become a commodity feature in the browsers.
I remember when some websites started to use JavaScript to prevent other from copying their text (by suppressing the right mouse key, catching Ctrl+C, etc.).
Today, this reappears as "DRM enforced via Flash" on YouTube and many other sites. These new types of DRM won't remain in an open web for long, either, for the same reasons that trying to block Ctrl+C is insane.
So I'm asking myself why this guy put himself into that very weak position in the first place, by providing a webservice rather than a tool or browser extension.
- rabidsnail 14y agoMost people don't know how to install software. That might change now that the browser-extension install processes have been streamlined (except on IE, of course), but for the most part getting code running on a user's machine is a huge hurdle.
- Gring 14y agoHere's an example that I encountered a few days ago: I only had an iPad (something more and more common, keep in mind their growing popularity) and wanted to download the Song "Alfur ut ur hol" by Björk (which you can't buy in record stores or the iTunes store - it's a rarity recording she released when she was 11 - but it's available on Youtube). While there are youtube-downloading-apps on iOS, none of them were able to convert the downloaded movies into audio-only files. Then I found youtube-mp3.org. The site, together with the iCab iOS web browser (which can download files) did the trick.
- Terretta 14y agoThe iCab browser for iOS is a gem.