Google Will Save Videos After All 69
don9030582 writes "After Google announced it would permanently shutter its Google Videos collection, dozens of volunteers from around the world sprung into action in a massive effort to make a copy of the entire site. It was originally slated to go dark on April 29th, but now they have eliminated any such deadline and furthermore they will be migrating the collection to YouTube. We wish Google would have planned to do that from the beginning, but ultimately this is a victory for the preservation of user-generated content on the Internet."
Evil Google (Score:3, Funny)
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Damn you Google: I spent last weeks sucking videos and wasting bandwith FOR WHAT? Time to send me that Nexus as a compensation, at least.
I would love to see you $600+ internet bill!
Google wanted to restore faith in the cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing could have diminished faith in the cloud more than to delete years worth of content overnight from the cloud.
It was a dumb idea to even discuss deleting it forever when Google wants us to trust them to host the data forever.
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Nothing could have diminished faith in the cloud more than to delete years worth of content overnight from the cloud.
It was a dumb idea to even discuss deleting it forever when Google wants us to trust them to host the data forever.
Im so tired of hearing about the fucking cloud. Its a server farm, get over it. You lose control of anything you send there, get over it. You are at the mercy of the cloud operator when you store anythng there, get over it. You really want to host something and have it work the way you want host it yourself. Thats all there is to know. The end.
Re:Google wanted to restore faith in the cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if you pay for it. Only free "clouds" have this limitation. Paid "cloud" can be governed by SLAs and contracts; only a bankruptcy might throw a wrench of the "all your data gone with no recourse" sort into things.
Home and small business "SLAs" (Score:4, Insightful)
Only free "clouds" have this limitation. Paid "cloud" can be governed by SLAs and contracts
Home and small business "SLAs" for paid hosted services are best effort only, and the "contract" for home and small business tiers stipulates only that the provider must refund the service for the rest of the period.
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So essentially your data is just as subject to being lost forever as it was... hell, as it's always been?
Nothing has really changed in terms of data retention (or the lack thereof), aside from whose responsible for when it gets lost. Formerly you, now everyone but.
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What does this have to do with the reliability of the cloud? Nobody ever promised your data would survive a service closing its doors.
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Customers will choose what they perceive as the most reliable cloud, so it's definitely an important feature even if no service is promising anything for the moment.
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Again, though, this has nothing to do with the cloud. The service was discontinued, not suddenly either.
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No, Im saying it does not illustrate a problem with the 'cloud'.
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There used to be some good shit on YouTube. It's mostly all gone now.
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So you're upset over the possible loss of rare Google Videos content, but not the hundreds of thousands of ~pre-2007 YouTube videos which are deleted every day?
There used to be some good shit on YouTube. It's mostly all gone now.
Are you referring to deletion by the user or by a copyright claimant?
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Probably referring to deletion from YouTube by Google for no longer complying with their changed - and apparently quite arbitrary - content standards.
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I would love to see you $600+ internet bill!
Send me the Nexus and I'll send you back the bill, deal?
I was worried... (Score:2)
That some of my mid-2000s-era cat videos might disappear into oblivion.
Google responds to the community (Score:1)
God is good.
Unlike certain other companies, when the community speaks Google listens. The community has spoken and it was clear all along that the community wanted to save Google Video not so much for the legacy interface but the actual content.
As long as the content is transferred over to YouTube there wont be a problem. But a lot of content is only available on Google Video. To just erase years worth of content is just stupid. This could have been solved by just transitioning or transferring the content o
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The community has spoken and it was clear all along that the community wanted to save Google Video
How much community is there when "volunteers from around the world" adds up to "dozens".
Re:Google responds to the community (Score:4, Insightful)
How much community is there when "volunteers from around the world" adds up to "dozens".
Those were the people doing the downloading. There were thousands more who were telling Google not to be stupid.
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To just erase years worth of content is just stupid.
Google does just that with YouTube. Much of the early-days classic videos were automatically purged - unless it was on some top-100 list or something then most videos from e.g 2005 or 2006 are just gone.
Too much censorship on youtube (Score:1, Funny)
Youtube all too often give me the "sorry, this content is not available in your country" or "this has been blocked for no reason", or has video restricted by copyright locality. Granted I'm willing to watch silly nazi propaganda and hitler parodies but hell, why should I be disallowed to?
I'll miss Google Video, as you could find some of the blocked content on it.
Take it to the ballot box (Score:5, Insightful)
but hell, why should I be disallowed to?
Because you and millions of others like you continue to vote for legislatures that continue to allow this to happen.
Was this a bandwidth-saving measure for Google? (Score:1)
While it's nice to see Google doing the right thing, I question their change of heart. My own guess would be that far more people began leeching ungodly amounts of Google Video content, putting a strain on Google itself.
Rather than continue the pain, Google simply decided to allow people to transfer video from Google Video to YouTube.
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If anybody could handle the bandwidth, its Google. The "strain" was most likely unnoticeable and would have been short lived, as opposed to storing those videos on youtube indefinitely.
Google just decided to do the right thing. Really, knowing Google, it was just a bunch of engineers that thought it could have been done better.
This is why the paranoid and idiots should NOT bre (Score:2)
This is why the paranoid and idiots should NOT breed.
A: This is google, they got more bandwidth.
B: To save bandwidth from people downloading movies, they put the movies on site where you can download them...
Go kick your parents, they are really to blame.
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The second URL explains it quite clearly:
We've created an "Upload Videos to YouTube" option on the Google Video status page [...] Before doing this you should read YouTube's Terms of Use and Copyright Policies.
So if it is against YouTube's policies, then it's out.
If you are curious, TED.com has a brief but interesting video that explains how YouTube automates their search for copyright infringement, and how effective it is regardless of the quality of the submission. These automated systems can tag shaky video recorded onto mobile phones, for instance.
It's not a search for copyright infringement (Score:2)
TED.com has a brief but interesting video that explains how YouTube automates their search for copyright infringement, and how effective it is regardless of the quality of the submission. These automated systems can tag shaky video recorded onto mobile phones, for instance.
If the automated system isn't capable of evaluating the fair use rationale in the video's description, then it isn't a search for copyright infringement as much as a search for mere copying.
scammed again? (Score:1)
Quality of YouTube-hosted Google Videos (Score:1)
So will videos on Google Video need to be re-encoded to play on YouTube?
A lot of the content on Google Video is already postage-stamp sized and blurry. A further encoding could make them unviewable but all but the most dedicated fans.
hahah (Score:1)
Yes, a victory for user-generated content. It's nice to have a victory where we all lose.
Back in the day (Score:1)
Opt for Vimeo? (Score:1)
Vimeo's non-commercial policy and video games (Score:4, Informative)
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Spam? (Score:2)
Funny enough the email from Google about this ended up in my Gmail's "Spam" folder.
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Same here with my account. Sheesh!
of course! (Score:2)
Of course they will!
They saved all your wifi traffic, why not save your videos too!
Did anyone actually think... (Score:2)
that Google would ever relinquish any data on anything?
Re:relinquish any data (Score:3)
No, it's like a water oasis in the dry west.
I agree they were never going to destroy the water. They just at first decided to remove all of the public access facilities.
No one's yet mentioned the other side of the story - to "start this campaign" all these volunteers - had to commit copyright infringement! So the wild part is that instead of suing each user for $ONE BILLION DOLLARS each, they said "oh, cool. You like that stuff. Okay, we'll keep it so we can make some ad money."
Remember that story about "wh
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You missed my point AC.
Google chose ad revenue over copyright lawsuits!
Do that with Big Music and let the people share, say on a music annex of youtube, and ditch the lawsuit winter.
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I wouldn't exactly call Youtube's advertising "robust". As best I can tell, the only "advertising" they do is by way of occasional sponsored events like the 5 Gum presentation of Coachella live and maybe the "promoted videos" that you often see on the front of youtube which are obviously a form of advertisement and I assume they get paid for. Since I don't waste my time watching videos that are obviously just ads, it doesn't impact me one bit. And when I'm watching live high quality streaming content from t
Length (Score:2)
Google Video allowed very long videos, something around 2 hours. On YouTube, the maximum length is 15 minutes!
Given this, the important question is: how can we migrate our old favorite MST3k episodes that are still on Google Video?
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That maximum length desn't apply for people who have built up a history of uploading only stuff that fits their community guidelines. It certainly doesn't stop google from adding video themselves.
I dare you to watch this one for its entire length: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5PiXt6INSM [youtube.com]
THough obviously MST3k episodes are going to violate the copyright part of those guidelines...
Quality? (Score:1)
The big question for me is this--
The download link only allows you to get the encoded FLV file. Does this mean they failed to store the originals? And if this is so, does that mean YouTube would be serving up the old fashioned h.263 FLV low quality encodes? If that's the case, we'd be much better off _not_ using the auto-move service, as YouTube encodes at much higher quality than Google Video did.
Or, did they just not want us to be sucking their bandwidth by allowing us to download the original footage, bu
I got the entire letter "G" (Score:3, Interesting)
I spent 4 days downloading the letter "G" - over 29GB of data. Spent 4 days rsync-ing it back up to the archive server. It's nice to know that a bit of history has been saved. I can't judge its merits - to me it was a bunch of silly videos, but who am I to judge...
You still have the same problem... (Score:2)