As some of you may have already noticed, we’ve posted a couple YouTube trailers on our site this week (e.g. Donkeys). Many have suggested their inclusion in the past, but I’ve always been against it due to 2 main reasons:
- The quality tends to be lower due to the way YouTube does compression
- There isn’t an easy way for us to provide you with a download link
We can fix reason #2 by downloading the trailers ourselves and hosting it, but because of reason #1, we prefer to wait for official releases with higher quality. However, we have come to realize that certain HD trailers will only be on YouTube. With that in mind and wanting our site to be the central hub for all movie HD trailers, we came to a decision to include them.
Update: To make our intentions a bit clearer, the only YouTube trailers we’ll be posting are for trailers we cannot find a higher quality for. Secondly, we won’t stop posting trailers from Apple, Yahoo, etc. This will only be in addition to what we’re currently doing.
Unfortunately we can’t provide direct download links to YouTube videos, but we have provided a link to KeepVid, which will provide you with direct download links. It’s a bit annoying when you get that Java prompt, but I notice even if you click NO, the download links will still be provided.
There are also other browser extensions/add-ons and download utilities that one can use which will make downloading YouTube videos easier. I’ll probably be writing up a tutorial on how to download from YouTube sometime later. I’m also looking into getting JavaScript to download the video you’re watching.
One might argue why anyone would come here to search for YouTube trailers. Our reply would be our target audience isn’t really searching for that trailer, but instead is browsing our website checking out new trailers for movies they’ve never heard of.
We won’t be posting these YouTube trailers on our blog, but if there’s enough demand, we might reconsider. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please do leave them below. We’d love to hear from you.
nice inclusion!
thank you very much !! – personally the most important thing for me is to see the actual “release” of a movie trailer… then i know that sooner or later it will be available on other websites.. and i don’t mind to wait..
I think you really should host them, since, apart from forcing us users to use some shady software, most of us are unable to see them in our countries, due to youtube restrictions.
The quality of YouTube trailers are too low for us to consider hosting them.
If you’re really considering downloading YouTube videos, I would highly suggest a browser addon (e.g. DownloadHelper Firefox Extension)