Streaming video uses up humungous amounts of bandwidth. At the same time, many videos are only incidentally videos, but primarily audio, for instance lectures, vlogs, music videos, and in fact i tend to listen to videos rather than watching them. There are also blind people who don't benefit directly from streaming video.

Clearly this applies to YouTube but also anywhere else that streams video over the internet. It would make things a lot easier if there were an option to turn the video off while leaving audio intact. This would also allow it to be accessed on older hardware.
-- nineteenthly, May 26 2008

Especially for those poor sods (I used to be one) who are still on dialup, waiting for the world to arrive.
-- plynthe, May 26 2008


my system routinely displays webpage-embedded videos as a series of random images 5-10seconds apart
-- FlyingToaster, May 26 2008


Well there you go. I'm lucky enough to have broadband, but when someone uses YouTube on one PC, the internet connection on the other one slows to a crawl.

Would it maybe be possible to have a server which sort of "mirrors" streaming video sites but removes the audio? It sounds feasible to me, but i know nothing.
-- nineteenthly, May 26 2008


I imagine it would be easily doable for the more common media players (WMP, MPC, etc), but the really horrible ones are the half-assed (not half-baked) proprietary Flash-based ones; the people that scribbled those probably couldn't be arsed.
-- FlyingToaster, May 26 2008


Interesting thought. Would it be possible to filter out the stuff on the server side though? It would still be downloading video otherwise, wouldn't it? Or do you mean on the mirror?
-- nineteenthly, May 26 2008


mostly I was just bitching about my computer "not being fast enough", but serverside would be the way to go... IIRC some video standards encapsulate common audio standards so it would be cut'n'paste serverside; wouldn't need to decompress/recompress.
-- FlyingToaster, Mar 19 2009


A few lines of shell script + vlc could bake this (server side).
-- Spacecoyote, Mar 19 2009


Would VLC do FLVs? Actually, yes, i can see that. Aren't there places which scavenge stuff off YouTube for recording and the like? If they can do that, doesn't that mean somewhere could do this? In that case, why hasn't it been done? How long would it take YouTube to shut it down?
Edit: Just found a link. It may be dodgy though, i feel suspicious about it and i've just deleted the link. It was listentoyoutube.com if you want to take the risk.
-- nineteenthly, Mar 19 2009


VLC will transcode just about anything to just about anything else, and it works on command line.
-- Spacecoyote, Mar 19 2009


I knew it did all that but i've never tried it out. You've provoked me into experimentation.
-- nineteenthly, Mar 19 2009



random, halfbakery