Downloading Tornado Videos

[TH2002]

One thing that is not only saddening but also infuriating to me is that excellent tornado videos can disappear off of the internet at any time. There are various videos (most notably the 1995 Anderson Hills tornado footage) that have unfortunately met this fate.

The remedy to this, in my opinion, is to download and preserve these videos. YouTube is the de facto monopoly for online video sharing and because of how poorly it's run sometimes I just don't feel like dealing with their website when I want to watch some good tornado footage.

Contrary to what many will tell you, downloading most YouTube videos for personal use is NOT illegal. I am not condoning the illegal download of music, TV shows and other copyrighted material, but I make the case that downloading tornado videos is for preservation and archival purposes. If the video disappears from YouTube or whatever site it's being hosted on, it will be preserved in a collection and not lost to the sands of time. With that said, redistributing the videos as your own could get you in serious trouble.

Unfortunately it has been getting harder in recent years to download videos from YouTube mostly due to pressure from greedy media conglomerates like Viacom. ddownr and Loader.to still work fine (but I do advise using an ad blocker)

 

[bjdeming]

They're selling a product and make things difficult now unless one buys into the YouTube Premium upgrade, which I've done because I'm hooked on MST3K and Mozart and don't yet have the scratch to buy the official CD collections -- which I will do eventually because: (a) I never knew before this how good Mozart is or that there's a collection out there (the playlist is long but incomplete); and (b) nostalgia (irrelevant factoid: COVID finally felled Space Chief, who was a martial arts star in his youth -- he was just trying not to hurt those Neptunian actors in one of his first movies -- and he lived well into his 80s).

It's a hassle but can work out for everybody. Sometimes.


The best way I know of to preserve videos for posterity, outside of the Library of Congress, is for those who have the rights to upload them to the Internet Archive. There might be ways for those owners to make money, too -- anyway, while reading archived books, there is sometimes a prompt about buying it.