Iam John Nader, founder of Yout.com, you can delete the 'ube' out of YouTube Urls or you can search for videos and record them as Mp3 or Mp4, I started coding on CodeCademy and ended up #1 on ProductHunt AMA!

That is a very useful idea. Are there any copyright issues? With sites like Grooveshark.com getting forced out that offered free streaming music, and YouTube really trying to make a buck on pre- and mid-video ads on music posted directly from copyright owners, how could something like this not get shut down? I saw in another comment, you said Yout is a DVR for the internet. But can you export the files from your 'DVR' and share them in this instance? Not trying to be a naysayer I am just curious.

I'm basing it on the "Betamax" supreme court ruling on case "Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc." in the United States, There is another law as well in Germany, I can't find it off hand that is the same thing for the EU.

here it is, the right to make copies for private use is protected under § 53 para. 1 UrhG.

It is rare that I get to say that someone's knowledge of law is less than even could be gained through reading Wikipedia, but sadly this is one example. As the wiki article points out, the same legal argument was unpersuasive for Napster and their service was much closer to what you are doing than what Sony did.

Copyright law has moved a lot in 31 years and you would be very well advised to consult with a lawyer who concentrates in this field before you find yourself sued.

If I have to bet, as an attorney, I think you would lose. There is no "time shifting" argument available here since YouTube is available 24/7. Your service enables people to make copies of copyrighted videos without permission. Get some legal advice quickly.

Good luck!

Napster was P2P. This is not. So I am would venture to say that Yout is much closer to Sony.

YouTube is availabe IF you have internet 24/7. Some of us don't have that liberty.

Don't try that argument in court.

Again, PLEASE see a lawyer. You're in way over your head.

You may be right, and I may not see the gravity of the situation I am in. But if I get to the point where this becomes a issue, I will fight for a cause I believe in, and I'm content with that

"I'll put on my life vest if I begin to drown."

This is all based on the premise that I would be going into open water at least prepared enough to bring the life vest with me, so I guess I didn't do everything wrong. Don't need to wear it around when I'm still on dry land.

I just visited it. It's a cool website. I always wanted to download entire YouTube playlist in mp3 format. There's no option on your website to let users record entire playlist. How about adding the service to download entire playlist in a single click?

This is a great idea. I will put it on the list. Thank you!

You mention "CodeCademy". How did you begin (i.e. how did you choose a language, path, etc.), and how long before you felt like you were solid enough to begin developing something like this?

I still believe I am a pretty awful programmer, so I would say I will never feel solid enough, it was simply solving one tiny problem, then the next, and getting big problems to where I only needed to solve one tiny problem a bunch of times

Oh man, I could write a book on what it's like choosing what language to write in. First you have Python, Php, Node, etc, It all really is like trying to decided what religion you want to follow when you start out.

I go into it the medium article, but I basically wanted originally to make a reddit for videos and saw reddit was written in python. So I choose that. Once you end up further down the programming road you realize that each language is more a tool than the solution for everything.

I originally tried to do the front end entirely from Jinja2 which is what flask uses. That was a front end, although fast, couldn't get the user experience how i felt it should be, when I finally learned some javascript and realized that my loyalty to one was no longer, and then I got into bash, etc..

Is there a time length cap. I tried to dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8-l6cdfSkA

& it gets only about 15 mb of it.

Nice though for shorter stuff it seems.

That is a very peculiar, it seems that around halfway through that video it goes completely silent, so the data stops for a bit. It should work for other videos of longer lengths, please try any while I investigate that issue.

I've fixed this issue

Very cool! What's your marketing model for a service like that?

Still haven't gotten that far yet in my planning, first a bunch more features I want it to have, but I finally felt confident enough in it that I wouldn't mind people actually knowing about it. the goal is to keep it minimalistic though. I don't want it to become something that I wouldn't use. Reddit is a great example, as well as DuckDuckGo of how things can stay simple

How long before Google sues you? Two weeks, or three weeks?

Don't get ahead of your self, Google wont sue me, YouTube isn't owed by Google. It's owned by Alphabet

hey john, big fan and you have no idea how many videos i made to mp3 without opening a new tab .good work.

So Questions:

1. As a CompSci student , i wanted to know .. were there any encoding problems when you started converting the videos to .mp3 ?

2. did you use xhtml to embed the youtube videos ? if so how ?

3. Can we improve our web technologies anymore ?

I waited till I had slept to come and answer this question. Thanks for the compliment

were there any encoding problems when you started converting the videos to >.mp3

You have absolutely no idea how difficult it was to solve this on the fly. For a month I everything I tried failed. There where issues, and as you can see in one or two of the comments with some very obscure use cases its not working well. But in general there are enough open source command line tools you can get nifty with to make it work. Just takes... a lot of trial and error.

did you use xhtml to embed the youtube videos ? if so how ?

We are using angular 1.x in the front. Still haven't decided if we are going to try and migrate yet to angular 2, as a engineer you know, if it's not broken why fix it? But angular has 'ng-bind-html' which takes care of this.

Can we improve our web technologies anymore ?

Of course we can. I ended up hitting the limits of the Mp4 container. That's when you know things suck. You get a problem after a while down to one thing, and then you find out that you can't do it with the container format you want. So had to find a way to still be able to use it.
The thing is I believe most web/internet techonology is basically turning into a bunch of API's, and they let the user do most the calculations. Finally went from the extreme of static, to the extreme of front end heavy to a nice mix.

Just tried it. That's pretty sweet. Any other cool things in the works?

Android App, Clipping, Audio Quality, different formats, Api, etc etc It's fun to work on

Did you pay for membership on codeacademy or just use the free course?

I did it free. Once I finished the Python Course, and the Angular course. After I finished I spent most time on Stack Overflow, and reading tutorials i found in google based on what I wanted to do.

Don't be scared to google extremly dumb questions, there is probably some one else who had the same question and about 10 people who wrote how they solved it. It's not like school where if a teacher sucks, your stuck w/ them. Here you can just go to the next tutorial and see if it explains it better.

Why did you put the effort into doing something that has multiple solutions already?

Won't YouTube just find a way to block you any way?

Why did you put the effort into doing something that has multiple solutions already?

Well, I guess because I believe I can do something better than anyone else in that niche with enough time. Also, the amount of time it took to use most of the competitors if they didn't have the videos cached or what not would be minutes. And when internet is bad, those minutes can be the difference between you being able to watch/hear it later.

Won't YouTube just find a way to block you any way?

Great question. I hope not, if anything I view this as a mutualism relationship

Hey John, always great to hear about self-taught success stories, especially on codecademy. How did you graduate beyond Codecademy into doing more demanding front/backend work that was heavy in logic and algorithms?

One step at a time. The goal was to keep making it do things I wanted to do. It's funny how excited you get when you see a new error. New error = progress.

Every time I ran into a problem I worked on that problem till it was done. Then I worked on the next. And at some point I had no more problems, so I worked on features, and then those started to cause problems, so I spent time trying to fix those problems, rinse and repeat.

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Do you use youtube-dl in the back? If so, (or even if not, I guess) I have some ideas on how to make this better. Do you plan to open source the site and accept pull requests?

PM me or shoot me a tweet on twitter and we can DM @nadermx

Why dont you just get http://www.yt.com/ ?

Well fb.com sold for about 7 million. So yt, probably around that or more, I'm pretty broke atm, but I do love domains :(

Why Youtube won't allow downloads of their videos? It seems like Youtube wants repeat watchers, when new contents come in like rain.

I am no lawyer, but I'm sure YouTube has their reasons, Yout is a DVR for the internet

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WiBo... seems wibo.org is in flash, so firefox wont allow me to load it

So why should i use this exactly? It's yet another clone of those mp3 to youtube sites that encode files to 128kbps. You also forgot to add an extension to the file the user is downloading.

It's fast, you don't have to wait minutes to get the recording to start. It's as close to instant as I could get it, thus far

I'm going to assume your storing the most popular files on your server to speed up the process? Isn't that against the copyright? These type of sites usually don't last very long.

If you try none popular videos you will see the speed is exactly the same as popular videos. Nothing is stored, there was already a legal president in Germany about this and the legality of it, I made sure I am well within EU and US standards

You said that you are basing it off the betamax case, but isn't it still against the TOS of YouTube?

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm sure this is like beating a dead horse, but even if it was against the TOS of YouTube, which I don't believe it is, if a supreme court ruling isn't strong enough to override YouTube's TOS then I suppose we are all in deep shit, since that would make YouTube's TOS illegal. I'm sure YouTube has more than enough legal power to make sure their TOS are within the legality of the laws. If not who knows how many class action law suits YouTube would face.

You agree not to distribute in any medium any part of the Service or the Content without YouTube's prior written authorization, unless YouTube makes available the means for such distribution through functionality offered by the Service (such as the Embeddable Player).

That is from the YouTube TOS. The TOS also states that automated systems are not allowed. With that said, it may be difficult for them to take legal action against you. It's just worth keeping in mind that as you grow, you may garner the attention of the giant themselves and they might try and close you down.

Thank you I will, I honestly really appreciate Reddit, especially users like you, because it has given me multiple opinions to consider and help me prepare accordingly.

What you are doing is really cool. I tried it today but when I tried to download the mp3 and mp4 file, both times it said "Interval Server Error". What am I doing wrong?

Never said I was a good programmer. I'll check the logs, the site got a bit more exposure than I expected. Should be working fine now though, so please test

Hey John,

This really inspires me to pursue coding again. I wanted to learn but I let it get away from me. I would get so far and then become stuck on certain problem and get discouraged.

Is there anything (like mathematics) I should learn before I get back into coding?

Learn to ask questions. Regardless of how dumb it is. Ask questions. Once you get to a point where you can not make it further, you have posted the question on StackOverflow, you have gone into the Chat groups and asked there, once you are finally defeated. Then you have to get creative in how to solve it, think outside the box. Reach out to pro programmers on twitter, beg, do what ever to make your dream a reality.

Hi John, Every time I use your site, the mp3 will be like 30 seconds less than the actual youtube video.

What gives?

I just fixed this, was a timeout issue, please test again

What is your favorite sandwich?

Reuben

What languages other than Python do you know, how long have you been doing programming, and where did you learn each language? I know you learned Python on codeacademy, but how about others?

I can hold my own in some Javascript, specifically the angular framework. I know some bash, some php, and a couple other frameworks in those related languages (Django, Pylons, Bootstrap, etc) and of course html/css. Mostly everything from googling my errors, or asking questions on StackOverflow

Is there any loss in quality when you download a video?

The bitrate varies on the video, I'm working on being able to set the quality

So, this is basically an easy way to save YouTube videos?

Is there a way to generalize it to other video streaming sites? Some of them, like Vimeo, don't work on my computer (I have no idea why, they just never start playing), so it would be nice if I could enter any URL and be able to download the video to play it. Would that be easy to implement, or is your setup highly specific to YouTube?

Vimeo, SoundCloud, MetaCafe, etc are all in queue to be added.

Surely you aren't the first one to come up with this idea. Why have you become successful in your opinion?

I really have no idea. I set my mind to something and I find a way to get it done.

Have you been through any legal battles at all? If so which was the worse?

Regarding this, not yet. If they come I will deal with that problem when it happens. Till then I see no reason to worry about things that may never come to fruition.

Why should the 'ube' bother me?

Just trying to make the Alphabet a bit shorter I suppose

ok, so I've experimented with other ways to do this, and while I'm not particularly knowledgable about them, I was really impressed with the simplicity and speed that this worked for the first one that I did.

perhaps it's because there are so many shady ways this gets done, and since you haven't monetized this yet, you haven't been compromised?

Do you have a plan for how to make this sustainable without compromising the simplicity and integrity of it? I don't know what the costs are for hosting this, but it seems like something that will have to be resolved eventually

I reference Reddit and DuckDuckGo earlier in the comments as services that where able to keep their integrity without compromising simplicity. That is what I will strive for

One thing I like to have is an entire album, or a combination of songs, in one file. This makes it so I don't have to do any skipping or whatnot in the car. What would be useful is if I could provide multiple links and have them be merged into one file. Would that be possible?

Some one else suggested this in the comments, I will put this on the queue

Didn't you run for president?

Ralph Nader is one of my idols. The consumer has rights

You are a freakin' awesome superstar. Anything that challenges the status quo is FANTASTIC. I love your opening line - Google hates me. Hahahaha! Good for you! Go get' em!

What specifically are you trying to accomplish with your users for "Yout" ?

Thanks for the praise, help out by letting people know about it :).

What specifically are you trying to accomplish with your users for "Yout" ?

Good question. Trying to KISS them (keep it stupid simple)