Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#1

Post by foxbarrington » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want
videodownloadtool.io

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#2

Post by foxbarrington » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

I made this because I would download a lot of videos from Youtube to watch on my phone using VLC. Most of the videos I downloaded were from video game streams, and I wanted to constrain the video to just the gameplay (cropping the frame to just the game and trimming the timeline to ignore anything before/after). It got tedious to do this manually, so I made a tool to speed things up.

The video editing and streaming is CPU and bandwidth intensive. If you want to use this a lot, you're better off using your own server (there are 1-click deploys to both Heroku and Digital Ocean along with a link to the Dockerfile and source), but I've added a link to a demo server if you just want to try it out. Depending on how much use this gets, performance might go down the drain.

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#3

Post by terrycody » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

Sry but is there any online tools to do this? We all know there are a lot of online sites to download Youtube videos, but seems no such feature?

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#4

Post by pininja » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 3:23 AM UTC

foxbarrington wrote: post #2

I made this because I would download a lot of videos from Youtube to watch on my phone using VLC. Most of the videos I downloaded were from video game streams, and I wanted to constrain the video to just the gameplay (cropping the frame to just the game and trimming the timeline to ignore anything before/after). It got tedious to do this manually, so I made a tool to speed things up. The video editing and streaming i…

The cropping was a lot faster in that demo than I expected. Very cool!

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#5

Post by MattGaiser » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 3:28 AM UTC

terrycody wrote: post #3

Sry but is there any online tools to do this? We all know there are a lot of online sites to download Youtube videos, but seems no such feature?

Haven't most of the online tools been bullied out of existence? I imagine that is why you must deploy it yourself to DO.

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#6

Post by anitil » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 3:31 AM UTC

terrycody wrote: post #3

Sry but is there any online tools to do this? We all know there are a lot of online sites to download Youtube videos, but seems no such feature?

I think OP is suggesting that if you wanted that you'd need to set it up yourself.

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#7

Post by godmode2019 » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 4:05 AM UTC

terrycody wrote: post #3

Sry but is there any online tools to do this? We all know there are a lot of online sites to download Youtube videos, but seems no such feature?

Most sites, like mine use youtube-dl which just gets the video source file.

To crop it and process it at scale you are talking about thousands of dollars of servers to first download the file then process it.

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#8

Post by harrisonjackson » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

godmode2019 wrote: post #7

terrycody wrote: post #3

Sry but is there any online tools to do this? We all know there are a lot of online sites to download Youtube videos, but seems no such feature?

Most sites, like mine use youtube-dl which just gets the video source file. To crop it and process it at scale you are talking about thousands of dollars of servers to first download the file then process it.

Would be cool to see something client side using ffmpeg in browser, like https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

Found a previous post from someone using that lib https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26580333

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#9

Post by poopsmithe » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 4:35 AM UTC

Pretty cool!

I'm curious as to why this is offered as a cloud machine and not something that runs locally. Wouldn't the encoding performance on a free or cheap cloud instance be poor?

I create a lot of video compilations using twitch and youtube videos as source. My internet is 5Mbps down, 3Mbps up, so it can take hours to download long video streams and extract just the parts I want.

Because of my network limitation, I found a way to combine ffmpeg and youtube-dl to grab sections of video from a twitch or yt video. The following is an example which replicates the videodownloadtool.io example.

    ffmpeg -ss 00:15:34 -to 00:16:09 -i $(youtube-dl -f best -g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2tplcb6eE) -vf "crop=(iw*0.75):(ih*0.80):(iw*0.20):(ih*0.08)" ./output.mp4

Re: Show HN: Download videos, but only the parts you want

#10

Post by tuukkah » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 4:48 AM UTC

poopsmithe wrote: post #9

Pretty cool! I'm curious as to why this is offered as a cloud machine and not something that runs locally. Wouldn't the encoding performance on a free or cheap cloud instance be poor? I create a lot of video compilations using twitch and youtube videos as source. My internet is 5Mbps down, 3Mbps up, so it can take hours to download long video streams and extract just the parts I want. Because of my network limitation…

Wow, that's magic!

(It depends on youtube-dl -g producing a video URL that ffmpeg understands, which unfortunately is not always the case.)