For some background, y2mate.com has been my go-to site for downloading content from YouTube. Since I often use snippets from others’ YouTube videos for my classes (with appropriate credit given of course), not being able to download YouTube content is somewhat of an inconvenience.
The way I found out about this today was by going to the y2mate.com site. I was greeted with this message:
Knowing they couldn’t possibly have shut their service down without first notifying me, I did a little research. Here’s what I found:
“The RIAA’s war against stream-ripping sites in general offers the most plausible reason for Y2Mate blocking visitors from the United States. According to Google’s Transparency Report, the RIAA has sent DMCA notices to have more than 9,300 Y2Mate URLs delisted from Google’s search results.” (source) By the way, RIAA stands for ‘Recording Industry Association of America‘. And here’s the final judgement, if you’re interested (link).
Upon further investigation, the site isn’t actually shut down yet. It’s only ‘geo-blocking visitors from the United States and United Kingdom’. That said, using a VPN (virtual private network), I first went to Spain and that appeared to be blocked. Then Italy, and y2mate.com worked fine. This is to say, using a VPN it appears you can still use the y2mate service, but your mileage may vary depending on where you decide to point your VPN. By the way, I’m using the Personal Internet Access VPN for this testing.
OK, I know that sounds like a lot of work to download a YouTube video, and it is. So let me show you another way if all you need is a snippet from a video and not the whole thing. Download and install OBS Studio. Next, go to YouTube and find a good beginners tutorial (like this one). Once you think you know what you’re doing, screen capture your first video (or just the part you’re interested in). Remux it (you’ll need to watch the OBS tutorial to understand this concept). After remuxing, chuck your video into OpenShot for some editing tweaks, and voila, you have a perfect video for your collection.
Well, maybe that second approach to capturing YouTube videos sounds more complicated, and it is initally. But as I always say, “after you’ve done it a thousand times, it gets easier”. That’s right up there with “measure once, cut twice” that my Dad taught me…
So, the bottom line is, I’m really surprised it took this long for the RIAA to get around to shutting down a service like y2mate, but they finally did. And while this is a good thing for recording artists, it makes my work harder but not impossible. As you can see, there are always work-arounds that get the job done.
Footnote: Whenever using someone else’s YouTube content, be aware of the ‘Fair Use’ copyright laws that determine ‘How much of someone else’s video you
Footnote: Whenever using someone else’s YouTube content, be aware of the ‘Fair Use’ copyright laws that determine ‘How much of someone else’s video you can use in your YouTube videos?‘ This applies to audio, video, photos, written content, etc.
