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

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

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

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

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.

From personal experience.

There are a few out there, some have been shutdown for some reason, some seem to be not working and ones which promise think kind of feature are paid. So I needed a 30seconds clip from a 40mins video and not something that I need that frequently that I want pay a monthly subscription for. I ended up using youtube-dl and with a lot of trial and error of various custom commands to finally get what I wanted.

clipconverter.cc is the only one that worked with long videos for me

Wow, that's magic!

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

Related: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md...

> Because of my network limitation

I think you just answered your own question. ;)

> Because of my network limitation

If I'm understanding correctly your snippet you're downloading the whole video anyway, no?

below is (edited for hn) the script i use instead of youtube-dl. the ffmpeg option is added; need to test it. this script works with all non-commercial videos, like the one in the parent comment. for commercial videos that restrict downloads, a browser with limited DNS and request blocking or youtube-dl or a headless browser will work. if use m.youtube.com with minimum headers then should always get mp4 urls with 1-2 quality options: itag=18 or itag=22. run the script with no arguments to see what quality options are available. then run it again with 1 argument to download or run it with 3 arguments to download an excerpt.

if script is called "yt" usage is

  echo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2tplcb6eE |yt

  echo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2tplcb6eE |yt 22

  echo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2tplcb6eE |yt 22 00:15:34 00:16:09


     x3(){ # youtube url variations, adjust as needed
     sed '
     /youtube.googleapis.com/{s//www.youtube.com/;s>/v/>/watch?v=>;};
     s/youtu\.be./www.youtube.com\/watch?v=/;
     s/embed./watch?v=/;s/&.*//;
     ';};
     case $# in :) 
     ;;0)    
     x3|(read x;curl -LHUser-Agent: -sv4 "$x"|grep -o "https://r[^\"]*"|sed 's/\\u0026/\&/g;s/%3D/=/g;s/%2C/,/g;s/%2F/\//g') >.yt;
     grep -o "itag=[^&%]*" .yt||exec echo video removed;
     exit
     ;;1)
     x1=$(x3|sed 's/.*watch?v=//;s/[&%].*//')
     x2=$(sed -n "/itag=$1/p" .yt)
     esac;
     test "${x1}"||exit;
     case $# in :)
     ;;1) exec curl -LHUser-Agent: -sv4Ro "${x1}".mp4 "${x2}"
     ;;3) exec ffmpeg -ss $2 -to $3 -i "${x2}" -vf "crop=(iw*0.75):(ih*0.80):(iw*0.20):(ih*0.08)" "${x1}".mp4
     esac

   x3|(read x;curl -LHUser-Agent: -sv4 "$x"|grep -o "https://r[^\"]*"|sed 's/%26/\&/g;s/%25/%/g;s/%3F/?/g;s/\\u0026/\&/g;s/%3D/=/g;s/%2C/,/g;s/%2F/\//g') >.yt;

    x3|(read x;curl -LHUser-Agent: -sv4 "$x"|grep -o "https://r[^\"]*"|sed 's/%26/\&/g;s/%25/%/g;s/%3F/?/g;s/\\u0026/\&/g;s/%2C/,/g;s/%2F/\//g') >.yt;

Maybe it has something to do with the referral codes in the links?

Thanks! It’s cloud because I assume that a lot of people who want to use it will run into issues installing all the dependencies (yt-dlp and ffmpeg), and there’s also the bonus of being able to use this on any device (phones or work computers).

I made it open source so that anyone who wants to run it locally can do so, but maybe there’s a better way to do an easy to install local version?

As for something that I would rather have on a website instead of locally, extracting autogenerated/provided subtitles from YouTube videos, so you don't have to scrub through the entire video just to get to the information locked within it.

Since I'm usually using a web browser, it's more convenient for me to open a new tab and paste in the video URL than open a terminal and remember what the youtube-dl command has to be. Also, smartphones cannot use youtube-dl in convenient ways, at least the last time I tried, so I'd have to open a new SSH session on my phone and painstakingly type everything, and so on.

There used to be a site for exactly this purpose called hierogly.ph but it was shut down, and the author didn't open-source it.