Downloading complete music videos

[jeffbenson]

I'm looking for a site that I can download full length music videos in MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 format so that I can make VCD's or SVCD's and play them on my DVD player. I have been searching everywhere and cannot seem to find any sites that offer this. If one does not exists then I think it would be wise to create that kind of service for the public. A terabyte solution would be needed to store the videos and there should probably be a charge for downloading each video. I would suggest $1.00 per video.

The reasons I feel this service should be provided to the public can be summed up in the following examples:
I am a very big fan of music and videos. I love the video "Dance of the Dead" by Corrosion of Conformity. This video was played on Mtv's Headbanger's Ball in the early 90's. I would bet a large amount of money that I will never again see that video played on any music station because it is older and not in style anymore. I would really like to own a copy of that video to keep in my collection. There are thousands of videos that I would like to see again.
I have hundreds of videos that I've recorded over the years on VHS. Some of these videos go back to the mid-80's and I play them constantly. Each time I play them, the VHS tape deteriorates causing worsening quality in the sound and the picture. Eventually the tape will break and I will not be able to watch these videos any more because music stations will not play them (previous example). If I had them on CD, the quality would not deteriorate no matter how many times I played them. By using MPEG-1, I could store 80 minutes worth of videos on a 700MB CD-R/CD-RW that I could play on my DVD player in my living room.
I saw the latest video from Mudvayne a couple months ago and haven't been able to catch it again because, as a senior level programmer and DBA, I work many hours and do not have the time to sit and wait for that video to be shown again. It would be nice to be able to just download it.
Short-lived artists would be re-recognized. How many people do you think remember Paco's rendition of "Putting on the Ritz"? Probably no one until they saw that video listed for download.
When VJ's talk over the beginning or end of a video, or the video fades into the next video, it ruins it.
People are able to purchase single songs (MP3's) from many sites. Why not single videos?
I am not the only person that wants this service. Imagine how many millions of people around the world watch music channels because of the videos. Imagine how many people there are from different countries that don't get music channels but have internet access.

The nice thing about a service like this is that some of the profits could go towards the artists and crew who make the videos. At this time, artists don't make any money off of videos that are quite expensive to make. Profits for the providers of the videos would be quite large. For example: 1,000,000 people download 10 videos each for a dollar a piece on a single day. That's $10,000,000 in one day. I do not believe that this is an outrageous estimate. In fact, I believe it is quite accurate or even underestimated. On top of that, there is no inventory to maintain, and new products (videos) would be added almost every day.

Bandwidth has gotten to a point where downloading files of these sizes (approximately 10MB/minute for MPEG-1) is not much of a problem. DVD players are inexpensive now. CD burners come standard on quite a few pre-built PC's these days. And, blank CD's are incredibly cheap.

Making VCD's is quite easy. There are many free programs out there that will build your VCD for you. You just have to add the video files you want.


Jeffrey S. Benson
Senior Software Engineer
Phelps Dodge Corporation

E-mail: jbenson@phelpsdodge.com



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jeffbenson on 2001-07-03 09:43:05 ]</font>

[Z]

There is HEAPS of people posting music videos on the net
As for chargin for them, good idea,, But somehow i don't think the BIG guys would only want $1,
And comes back to storage ECCCK, That would be HUGE and also the capturing time !

[jeffbenson]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-07-03 09:56:17, Z wrote:
There is HEAPS of people posting music videos on the net
As for chargin for them, good idea,, But somehow i don't think the BIG guys would only want $1,
And comes back to storage ECCCK, That would be HUGE and also the capturing time !

</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Maybe you could point me in the right direction. The only thing I've seen is video streaming. Sure it's great to go to http://www.launch.com and view a lot of videos, but I'm getting neck strain sitting so close to my monitor trying to see the video in the small streaming window. I have a big screen TV and a whole system to match. That's where I want to watch my videos. I tried capturing them and making VCD's but the results weren't at the quality level I was looking for. I got a lot of aliasing and video noise (blocks and stuff). As you could imagine, on a big screen TV, any kind of digital distortion is really noticable. If I could download music videos that were already processed professionaly, that would be great. Do you know of any sites that I can actually download complete music videos, or were you referring to streaming video clips?

By the way, terabyte solutions are being used more and more these days. A good example or this technology is http://www.myplay.com At this site you can have 3GB of storage for keeping MP3's online. The service is free and a lot of people use it. If you go to their site, you can read about the technology they are using to handle all the MP3's.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jeffbenson on 2001-07-03 10:39:42 ]</font>

[Nickhamm]

http://www.musiccity.com

This site will tell you all about Morpheus, a napster-like client. You can download anything ferom music to ready to burn VCD movies (split into the right sizes) to Music Videos. I have Never Let You Go by Third Eye Blind, Push by Matchbox 20, Jack and Diane by John Mellencamp, and The Entire Superbowl Halftime show (Aerosmith & Nsync). I have also seen Miss Jackson by Outkast, Thank You by Dido, and Many, many others.

[jeffbenson]

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On 2001-07-03 12:07:58, Nickhamm wrote:
http://www.musiccity.com

This site will tell you all about Morpheus, a napster-like client. You can download anything ferom music to ready to burn VCD movies (split into the right sizes) to Music Videos. I have Never Let You Go by Third Eye Blind, Push by Matchbox 20, Jack and Diane by John Mellencamp, and The Entire Superbowl Halftime show (Aerosmith & Nsync). I have also seen Miss Jackson by Outkast, Thank You by Dido, and Many, many others.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Thank you I'll check it out

[Riot_Inc]

Try
http://www.moshshockerz.com

or

http://www.nothingvideos.com

[jeffbenson]

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On 2001-07-03 12:35:04, Riot_Inc wrote:
Try
www.moshshockerz.com

or

www.nothingvideos.com
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

Thanks. These sites have some of the newer vids I was looking for

[Squibbles1092]

http://www.kazaa.com

Perfect place for music vids...

Right click on the file you want to download and do "save target as" to download.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Squibbles1092 on 2001-07-03 15:09:14 ]</font>

[Riot_Inc]

What videos were you looking for specifically?

[henryfarbles]

if you want to get those videos from launch, I would try streambox vcr. i can't think of a specific link at the moment but a search in google would surely do the trick.

[zzyzzx]

If your looking for 80's vidoes, contact me.

http://szelazny.tripod.com/boot.html#vital

[godzprofit]

I have leeched many gigs from these guys and most of them have nice ftp servers. Their caps are excellent but they do add slightly annoying intro's and stuff.

http://www.visionsvids.com

http://motosvids.cjb.net/

http://www.1337media.com/~zone/

http://beam.to/daywalk3r

http://www.mattsmusicvideos.com/

[Stansell]

I agree with you on the music video front. That is one of the main SVCD projects that I do.

I have a DirecTV/Tivo system and get MTV2. Each week I capture the 120 minutes show (2 hours of alternative music) and ecode the videos that I don't already have to SVCD. I guess by the end of the year, I'll have a pretty comprehensive collection of 2001's alternative videos. on about 60 SVCD's As the years go on, I'll have a sizeable collection to look back on.

The cool thing is that they do not talk over the start or end of the videos nor do they transition between the videos, so there is always a nice blank area between each video to make edits. I have a changer, and I like to put them on shuffle play. The only annoying thing is the HUGE MTV2 logo in the corner. By only getting newer videos that I haven't gotten before, I only usually have to encode one SVCD a week. I get about 10 songs per SVCD.

It would be nice if there was a source for older more obscure videos. MTV2 did a total A to Z of all music videos at the start of 2000. It took them several months to go through them all showing 12 hours each day, repeating again at night. I wish I had my system then, I would have picked out some of my favorites to record.

[zzyzzx]

The problem with these downloadf places (and MTV2) is that you hardly ever see old vidoes. I'm not looking for anything recent.

[jeffbenson]

I appreciate all of your suggestions and I am trying out each and every method. The best method I have found so far is Kazaa. The problem with videos from Kazaa is that the quality varies to great degrees. My new attempt is to use Streambox VCR and try capturing streaming videos. The tricky part about using this method is capturing the URL of the stream. The sites that offer video streaming hide their URL in JAVA or a redirect. Through research I have found many different methods of getting around this and plan on trying them tonight. I will keep this up to date with my progress for anyone who is interested in music videos. By the way, I have not seen any documentation that would suggest that any of the methods posted on this topic are illegal.

[SKI2K1]

I have over 100 videos of electronic/industrial stuff I got mostly from http://www.winmx.com
It is a file sharing service like napster but better...

hope you find what you're looking for!

[zzyzzx]

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On 2001-07-06 07:47:41, SKI2K1 wrote:
I have over 100 videos of electronic/industrial stuff I got mostly from http://www.winmx.com
It is a file sharing service like napster but better...

hope you find what you're looking for!
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>
I used to use this but I can't get it to work anymore. it's impossible to connect to their servers anymore.

[jeffbenson]

Like I said, Kazaa is pretty good but the problem I'm running into isn't actually finding the videos, it's getting the quality. I'm hoping that I get the results I'm looking for with Streambox VCR. If it works, that means that you can go to sites like http://www.launch.com and get complete, professionally processed videos. Has anyone tried Streambox against launch yet? I tried to capture the URL with Project URL Snooper and didn't have any luck. There are a lot of other techniques to capturing the streaming URL that I've yet to try. I just downloaded Streambox VCR 3.1. This version has a packet sniffer and I'm hoping that it works better than Project URL Snooper. If anyone wants more info on what I'm talking about, go to http://www.google.com and search for streambox vcr or project url snooper (thanks to henryfarbles for the suggestion). You know, it's too bad that I (and most likely others) have to go through all this trouble because a service isn't provided to distribute videos. Anyone want to put up funds, services, or other resources to help me put something together (half kidding but half serious) I am a programmer and DBA and I have a small but professional studio so I do have an understanding of a lot of the technology and business that I would have to deal with.

[henryfarbles]

i've used streambox at launch before. it works well but the thing about streaming video is they're often not very high quality in order to cut down on loading times. Not bad though.With launch in particular, the videos aren't in mpeg so they need to be reencoded. I did notice if I darkened the video while encoding they looked a little better. Also, to get the right url at launch you can right click on the movie and go to properties. I don't remember where the exact url was inside but it's two different parts. You can copy and paste the link into streambox and download.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: henryfarbles on 2001-07-07 13:30:21 ]</font>

[henryfarbles]

Ok, I checked back over at launch on finding the videos url. First off, Launch has a few different quality options so chose the highest one they have( I think it's 256k/s). Then while the clip is playing right click on the video and go to properties. Now go to the "show" option. The first half of the url is under "show" where it says "location". Copy this and paste it into your address bar in internet explorer. I'm not sure if they're all the same but the one I took was "http://music.launch.com/musicvideos/player"(without quotes). Now add "/" to the end of that. So you should have "http://music.launch.com/musicvideos/player/". The next half is at the top under "show" next to the video icon. Copy that and paste it after the first url. Now press enter. If you have the right url windows media player will open on it's own and play the video. You can now paste the entire url into streambox vcr.

[jeffbenson]

Well, I was able to capture streaming videos after trying a couple different methods. I used Project URL Snooper to get the URL and Streambox to capture the stream. I'm sure henryfarbles methods work just as well (thanks for the suggestion), but I found out that the quality is bad if you are trying to convert the asf's to MPEG-1 for VCD's. As henryfarbles mentions, the bitrate is low so that the site can stream. Going from the max stream of 300 k/s to the VCD standard of 1150 k/s does not work that well. I even tried maxing all of the encoding options on TmpENC to see if I could get rid of the digital noise (blocks) but did not get the quality that I was hoping for. At this point I would settle for VHS resolution if I could get rid of the noise. I'll keep trying different things, but it's getting more and more frustrating.