Video

Tube Compressor
Video compression is all done in software, so no cool pictures.

Dug up an old post this morning looking for something I had written. Found the post, but the video I had included was missing. Well, we can't have that, so I undertook to replace it. First task is to find a copy.
    Took a little effort to track it down, especially since I hadn't bothered to label the video, and the text in my post doesn't provide much of a clue. The YouTube id got some hits with the search engine, Yahoo in this case, but no cigar. The Wayback Machine got me the YouTube page, but no video. The YouTube page has the video title, and searching for that string got me to an East Asian site, Korean, I think, that did have the video.
    Okay, let's download it, since the internet obviously cannot be trusted to save anything for more than a couple of nanoseconds. I've downloaded videos before and it's generally worked pretty well. Simply ask the search engine for 'download video' and pick the first one that pops up. Not this time. The first half dozen or so all wanted to sell me something, or download an app, or register. Wasn't until I got to ClipConverter that I got something that would just download the video.
    ClipConverter offered a choice of video formats, and since Blogger has not always been the most accommodating video host, I thought I could pick something common, like mp4. It downloaded fine but the video quality was piss-poor. Ok, let's try the default format, after all, the video I'm trying to steal is crystal clear. Better, but not still not there. Fine, let's try the format with the largest file size. Larger means less compression which means better video quality, right? The file type is 'flv', which I have never heard of, but Blogger has handled the first two okay, so let's give it a try. It downloads and Blogger accepts it. The video quality is better than the first two, but still not up to the original.
    The video isn't all that great, but it irritated me that it had vanished. It took so much effort to track it down that I thought I better record my efforts, because it will probably happen again, and having these notes might save me some time.