Is it corrupted? Or is it possible that only part of the video was archived? I know that a similar issue was discussed earlier and IDM seemed to be the solution in most cases but it just isn't cutting it for me. IDM and Firefox add-ons seemingly download the entire video but when I play it, it plays part of it and then abruptly skips to the end.
I tried playing the video in full in my browser but it always stops buffering around the 2 minute mark. I've tried everything from the Chrome Network/Media trick to Firefox video-downloading add-ons to Internet Download Manager (using PlayOnMac) and none of those seem to work. and the video plays, let's say, very reluctantly. The archived page uses the JW Player 6.4. Maintaining the underpinnings of a functioning democracy is more important than some private monopoly’s terms of service.So there's a video that's been deleted on YouTube, but archived on Wayback Machine, that I want to download. (In fact, *that* was the reason youtube-dl was reinstated on GitHub after Microsoft took it down, and I assume it’s the reason yt-dlp has not been rousted so far.
In the Western world, certainly, YouTube still enjoys a strongly dominant position in video-hosting and hence the ability to shape the information people can see - which is known as “manufacturing consent.” For journalists, academics, lawyers, and activists, it’s *critical* to be able to download copies of certain videos before Alphabet/Google/YouTube gets around to taking them down.
YouTube has *dramatically* increased the amount of censorship it does (via outright takedowns and also by making videos it doesn’t like unfindable in search), and it no longer targets only speech that isn’t protected under the First Amendment (e.g., teaching viewers how to cook up a batch of nerve gas in their kitchens), but legitimate, protected reporting, analysis, and opinion. Technically, downloading videos violates YouTube’s terms of service, but there is a superseding issue here. Were you using FDM for downloading YouTube videos? What are your alternatives? Take a look at our previous article for more ways to download videos. Meanwhile, you can use other programs like YouTube-DL, yt-dlp, youtube-dl-gui, XDM, IDM, FireDM (formerly PyIDM). The page's disappearance does seem like a serious issue, and it remains unclear whether FDM will add support for YouTube downloads again.
Here's a Web Archive version of it from April 2021. The YouTube page on FDM's site has also been pulled, and gives a 404. I mentioned earlier that the developer had to "turn off the option for YouTube", this is likely the intermediary service that was taken down. The other theory is that Free Download Manager relies on an external service for YouTube downloads, probably to parse the video links (fetch the metadata, URLs, resolution, etc.) and sends it to the program for download.
It seems unlikely, since I was able to download the videos using other programs. One, something has changed on YouTube's end, which is causing the error. So why were older versions displaying the error? Clearly this error isn't specific to the version being used, so it has to be server related problems. I was manually copying the YouTube video's URL and pasting it in the program.
Though I had the FDM extension installed in the browser, I wasn't using it to grab the media. So, I went all the way back to version 5, and it still gave me an error, but this time it said "Parsing failure.