Animated GIFs and video thumbnails from YouTube
Kanye West disses Taylor Swift
source video
In 2008 Fitim Blaku and I were playing around with ideas for manipulating video. Over a weekend I threw together a little site, tubechopper.com, for extracting animated GIFs, MP3 clips, and video thumbnails from a YouTube video. Its a fun hack with curl, ffmpeg, Image Magick, a JavaScript image cropper, and some jQuery dance steps.
Youtube later changed their techniques for publishing videos, which broke TubeChopper. I took it down.
Recently I saw that GifSoup began to get some traction on exactly the same idea. Argh. Don’t you hate it when that happens? I hand it to those guys, though, for good marketing, getting coverage in CNet, and adding the gallery for sharing videos. Google Adwords cover the site to extract what they can for their work. Nice touch.
For yuks I dusted off the code, fixed the Youtube scrapery, and posted the animated GIF Youtube converter to this blog. The code respects Youtube video providers who’ve asked that their videos be protected.
I love the example on that app! “I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!”