Downloading Videos

Mike Hammer: Next time you are pissed about how slow your internet connection seems to be running, just think about all of the hugely stupid video that is eating up bandwidth.

I always download videos rather than watch them "live." I can watch them repeatedly, or back up a bit if necessary, with the "cost" of just one download. Hate it when I can only watch something streaming.

Of course, since I come from the days of limited memory and 300-baud dialup modems, I am still byte-conservative. Bandwidth is going to keep getting faster & cheaper, I suppose, where streaming will matter less, but I'll probably always download.

Two other advantages of downloading.

If a vid gets yanked from the net, I've still got mine.

And when I use the YouTube downloader program, it doesn't register on my "what you watched" account the way it does when I go to YouTube with a browser. A small victory for privacy, but a victory.