YouTube doesn't want you to download their videos

Welcome back from Memorial Day, reporters! I was recently helping a friend set up a new laptop, and there are not many apps that I download right off the bat. But one of them is VLC Player.

It’s a free app capable of playing pretty much any video format I’ve ever heard of. No need to mess around with QuickTime, Windows Media Player and iMovie.

But you know what vaulted it into the TFR this week? VLC can download YouTube videos.

I came across this fact randomly, the same way I found out Google Keep could lowkey scrape the text from an image. Scraping YouTube videos is by no means the main feature of VLC Player, but it’s a secret weapon, and a pretty great one.

Now you may be thinking, “I don’t need that, I just use downloadYTvideos dot com,” or whatever. The thing is, apps with very specific uses like that don’t tend to stick around long. Anything with a name like convert2mp3 dot com, I don’t put in here because I don’t trust it.

VLC is more reliable because all it does is show you the source of the video file (aka scraping!). Check out this (clunky-looking) tutorial for how to do it, and maybe be careful publishing videos, because of copyright stuff. If nothing else, VLC should be your go-to video player.

P.S. I’m pleased to say TFR has its first ad! The GEN Summit is offering a 15% discount to TFR readers with the code GEN-TFR15. The GEN Summit is a conference for media leaders focused on digital innovation, and it’s June 13-15 in Athens, Greece 🏛. In exchange for sharing this info with you all, they’re letting JC (the unstoppable force behind TFR’s Twitter) attend for free. If you go to GEN, meet JC for a gyro!

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