Create Torrents out of YouTube Videos

Written by Smaran on February 07, 2007 

Online video conversion site, Hey!Watch has announced that it now allows users to download videos from the various video sites it scrapes, including YouTube, Google Video and Metacafé, over BitTorrent.

Once you point Hey!Watch in the direction of a YouTube video you want to download, it will get it, encode it in a format of your choice, and act as a super seeder for the first 12 hours, after which, the user and anyone else who has downloaded the video, can continue to share it with others.

Hey!Watch TorrentHey!Watch has really simplified the whole process of sharing a video over BitTorrent. Once you enter the YouTube URL on the site, it’ll fetch the video and create a torrent out of it. The only catch is that you must be using a BitTorrent client like Azureus or BitTornado, that supports the webseeding protocol.

How legal the service Hey!Watch offers is has yet to be questioned, but I doubt scraping video sharing sites like YouTube and offering videos for download, normally or over BitTorrent, is in accordance with those sites’ terms of service agreements. A while ago, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch was sent a cease and desist letter for putting up a YouTube download tool on his site.

The problem with Hey!Watch is that after you encode a certain number of videos, it asks you to upgrade your account, which costs, at a minimum, $4.99 a month. Free accounts are limited to 10 encodings per month, and all videos can’t be longer than 10 minutes. I guess I can see how something like this might be useful, but personally, I’d much rather just use the VideoDownloader Firefox extension or an application like PodTube. Everything doesn’t need BitTorrent.

Previously: University of Missouri Blocks All P2P Traffic

Next: IP Harvesting: Filesharers Guilty Until Proven Innocent

15 Responses

1 Feb 07, 2007 at 16:27 by slim2fit

nice

2 Feb 07, 2007 at 18:44 by matt

I wish it didn’t make you register, if they really want success they should make it free.

3 Feb 07, 2007 at 20:27 by 2legit

wow when you cop content like this you should link the original:

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8355/How+to+share+YouTube+clips+using+BitTorrent

4 Feb 08, 2007 at 03:42 by Janko

Actually the original can be found here …

http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-244.html

… so Zeropaid probably should have done the linking. But hey, we’re all inspired by each other :)

5 Feb 08, 2007 at 11:30 by PonchoLopez

Don’t really see the need for torrent like the article notes, http://www.flvstorm.com is working better than videodownloader right now and has more sites.

6 Feb 08, 2007 at 12:14 by Idiot Savant

LAWLS Blog Wars. Does it really matter ? The information is so old that Digg just discovered it.

How about you make your own youtube with some flvtool, and ffmpeg. Or you can be real cool and use something that is out that no one else is using.

7 Feb 08, 2007 at 12:24 by Jeremy

YouTube should buy this service. YouTube loses money and is not currently sustainable. By shifting bandwidth costs to the users, however, it could be.

This is where the future of a service like YouTube has to head if it really wants to make money, IMO.

8 Feb 08, 2007 at 20:28 by Not_too_sure

I’m not too sure of the use of this option to create a torrent out of YouTube movie.

Will these movies be of low quality like the one we see on YouTube?

9 Feb 10, 2007 at 01:45 by Jestiwa

seems reasonable enough I was on private beta for heywatch it worked well but limited conversion restraints were a pain.

10 Feb 11, 2007 at 10:28 by Nicole

http://vixy.net

Responses are closed

All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.