Downloading everything for the win

Last year I wrote about the concerns about streaming services run by Big Tech censors, and why your own private copy is so critical for anything you really care about:

With the latest round of hypersensitive media companies banning media works that aren't "woke" enough, it's getting even worse. Gone With the Wind, The Dukes of Hazzard, and a large number of TV shows featuring blackface jokes have been recently removed from streaming services.

The past couple weeks of course have rapidly accelerated this trend, to the point where U.S. media companies are under pressure to follow the lead of Canada's evil far-left state broadcaster and remove God-Emperor Donald J. Trump from the movie Home Alone 2.

Speaking of Culkin...his friends at RedLetterMedia had a YouTube video pulled this week. It wasn't political censorship unlike what happened to PragerU or Scott Adams but rather was a mere example of their crappy "copyright" system.

As an end user, whether it's because Google/Facebook/Twitter hate and fear superior conservative arguments, or lazily allow fraudsters to rip off their content creators, the end result is the video you used to be able to watch not being available anymore.

Speaking of which...

I think it was three years ago at the bar that Martok and I were talking about porn. One of the things he thought was pretty great about the modern world was that PornHub exists, and he never has to worry about having a porn stash somewhere because he can just go on PornHub and watch anything new he wants and remember enough titles to find old favourites relatively easily.

And then December happened. A fraudulent New York Times story claiming child porn and sex trafficking was "rampant" made huge waves: suddenly credit card companies were refusing to do business with companies based on the words of a serial presstitute:

When Kristof turns his notebook in the direction of women with stories of trauma, the resulting narratives most often fall somewhere between beneficent voyeurism and journalistic malpractice. (Kristof, writing about his coverage of refugees in 2006: “It’s often agonizing to try to figure out how far you can go in identifying a rape victim, for example, so that a column will come alive—without putting her at risk of revenge.”) He has yet to face any professional consequences for his role in advancing the Somaly Mam Foundation, the anti–sex trafficking organization that, thanks to him, was able to launder allegedly invented sex slave stories through the paper of record. (New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, in 2014, after one of his key sources was exposed for lying about sex trafficking: “Nicholas Kristof Should Give Readers a Full Explanation About Somaly Mam.”)

In response, PornHub bowed to pressure from credit card companies who themselves bowed to pressure from the New York Times (seriously, who even does that anymore?) and deleted all of their user-provided content. Suddenly Martok's old favourites aren't quite so relatively easily pulled up. In fact, overnight the popular site became more-or-less useless. The only videos still allowed up are "verified" partners (which curiously enough seemed to be the majority of the questionable videos to begin with). Traffic has fallen from the site so much that now the same porn actresses that were decrying it want it back up and running. Funny thing is that users could browse the site to their hearts' content and never once even stumble across the videos Kristof claimed was so common: while there certainly are going to be a small number of amateur videos put up of girls under the age of 18, we're likely talking 16 or 17 here and not 7 or 8. Bear in mind, as always, these are the same people assuring you that a 5 year old taking hormones is perfectly fine but a 17 year old being sexually pursued isn't.

Thanks to a Queerbec-based company buying up a lot of adult "tubesite" properties, there aren't many good competitors ready to take up the slack. Briefly in December SpankBang implemented a number of policy changes meant to keep the heat off of them, but after their traffic also collapsed they relented. FreeUsePorn has seen a huge traffic spike since mid-December that, like Gab and Parler this week, have resulted in crashed servers and difficulty scaling up their bandwidth.

PornHub also made a big deal about how they stopped people from downloading offline copies of their videos. But they didn't. They couldn't. Because the dirty little secret is anything that can be streamed to your screen can be similarly put onto your hard drive. The little 1s and 0s don't care where they go, and there's lots of software overruling those who try to stop you. Absolutely any video on any streaming site can be downloaded with the right browser extension or third-party website.

For YouTube, the best way to save any short video onto your hard drive is the YouTube to MP3/MP4 online converter. I routinely use it to save songs I find on YouTube and if your video is short and you don't care about the image quality it's a quick and dirty little tool. Literally dirty though: be warned it's one of those sites you have to be quick on your mouse finger as it tends to load those Bet365 popup windows that quickly refresh to say "your computer is hacked and you need to send us money". For longer videos or ones where you want to preserve a higher resolution, using the VLC music player is your best bet:

1. Open VLC and click "Open Media"
2. Click "Network" and paste YouTube URL (note: use the one from the top of your browser, not the link generated when you "share" the video)
3. Select "Tools" and then "Codec Information" because you're using Windows. Mac users are tiny babies who shouldn't be reading my blog.
4. Find the "Location" bar at the bottom and copy that URL
5. Paste that URL into your browser (pro tip: use an incognito window so future searches aren't super-annoying with the auto-fill)
6. Right click the video and select "Save Video As"
7. Name the file and save to desired location

For other websites like the PornHubs or DailyMotions or CBC.cas of the world, the DownloadVideoHelper is your go-to source. It lets you save the video from any website (ironically it doesn't really work with YouTube and only saves the video without sound) permanently. No longer will deletions (for whatever reason) of your favourite video material concern you. I presume everybody now is using either the Brave or Dissenter browsers: both of which allow you to install the DownloadVideoHelper from Google itself (we will sell the woke Big Tech censors the rope they will use to hang themselves) here.

That's all fine and good if you feel like building a time machine, going back to November, and downloading the "Best of the Worst: Diamond Fox vs The White Cobra" video onto your own hard drive. But it's now January 18th 2021 and it's been pulled from YouTube. What on earth can you do?

Oh, that's easy: just go here and after a few minutes delay you can watch the entire video. Or, do what I did and use the VLC player trick above using the archive.org URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20200917003102if_/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKKVSjw6JY

I even put it all together in a handy video:  

As BigTech increases their censorship, what I said last summer is more and more true with every passing day: if you don't physically possess a piece of content, they can and will try to take it away from you.