It's really hard to get the permanent URL for the MP4 of a YouTube video
Basically, it's not hard, there just isn't one.
[Disclaimer: I'm a coder in training, I may be talking rubbish]
So I'm trying to get permanent URLs of the mp4 resources of YouTube videos. This is hard. They make it hard. I suspect on purpose (I would speculate as to why, but that's an entire post about protectionism). (As do Vimeo). You could say "they're doing it wrong", and actually, in my opinion, you'd be right.
This is what I want:
- permanent link to the MP4
- not a link to the FLV
- from knowing only the original page URL of the YouTube video
- or from the embedded player somewhere else on the web
YouTube add a temporary key in the URL you can find. Meaning that even if you can find it, it will expire (I don't know after how long). Useless. But that's not terrible, maybe you can make a call to YouTube each time you need to request the MP4. Annoying, but possible.
So, these don't work (unless I'm being a moron)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=iPGMnm6K3RGAP4y9rbQIDg
You can use this to see the output of that, but it doesn't give you the file..
http://blog.pipes.yahoo.net/2008/04/02/new-yahoo-pipes-php-serialized-output-renderer/
Also just doesn't work, probably same process as the pipe
And the same problem.
Lots of people are talking about how to do this, and there are some bookmarklets that will try
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/printthread.php?tid=12313
http://lifehacker.com/379335/download-youtube-videos-in-higher+quality-mp4-format
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/34556 (userscripts is down as I post this. Who knows, this one might work!)
But not that recently. Oh hang on, this can do it, but who knows how
But it won't (can't?) give a permanent URL. They also have a statement on their site that "YouTube has blocked all direct downloading sites!"
Ah ha, I hear you cry. Isn't YouTube testing their HTML5 player, that supports playing MP4s direct in the browser with the <video> tag?
Well, kind of. The HTML5/<video> player is (eventually) embedded in the page. Using JavaScript I believe. And the URL to the MP4 resource is injected into the SRC attribute, also using JavaScript. So I guess it does work, in that technically it isn't broken. But it's not in the spirit of how it should be done. (Vimeo, you're doing it like this too.. well the SRC injection at least).
This is probably one of those 'spirit' versus 'intent' cases.
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