YOUTUBE DOWNLOADER FOR JOURNALISTS

I probably don’t need to tell you that news outlets are going out of business left and right. When this happens, there’s a very real possibility that your work could disappear, forever.

There is software out there that will download YouTube videos in an easier interface, but this setup has a couple of extra features for journalists who need specific metrics data for their portfolio: it adds the upload date and the viewcount into the file name. See the above image for an example.

This is more a tutorial than 'software' proper, but hopefully it's easy to follow. Works on a Mac and Linux, with instructions for Windows. You can access it here.

MAC FRONTEND: TWITCH DOWNLOADER

Ever wanted to save your favorite Twitch streams for later?

Or, are you a Twitch streamer who wants to take your social clips to the next level by making them more dynamic?

Or do you want to do some sort of analysis on Twitch chat logs from your stream, or someone else’s?

This app might be for you. Here's a 3-minute walkthrough of how it works:

Click below to download:

credit/note: this is just a simple frontend that takes the capabilities of TwitchDownloader and puts it into a convenient package for MacOS. If you’re on Linux or Windows, check out the original app instead!

How It Works:

1. Open the app (you may need to ctrl+click to bypass a warning)
2. Copy and paste the Twitch stream URL.
3. Choose where you want to save it on your computer.
4. Hit the download button, and that's it!

You’ll end up with a folder containing three files:

• a .json file - this is the plain text of the chat
• a .mp4 file - the Twitch VOD itself
• a .mov file - this is video of the chat

You can drop both video files into any video editor, and by turning the chat video .mov transparent, you can overlay it onto the VOD .mp4 and create a dynamic video for social clips, or whatever you’d like.

If you’d like to alter how the chat video looks (eg using a different font, hiding specific users), you can open the twitch_downloader_config.json file and make the changes there.

to-do list:

• fix date scraping

Source code

mac

The source is here,

and you can either run it direct from the command line, or use an app like Platypus to build it yourself. In both cases, you’ll need to also get ffmpeg (download here) and the original TwitchDownloader command line app this is built on (download here).

linux

note that there's a proper GUI alternative for linux here, but if you want to look at the code, here it is:

Before running, make sure that the original TwitchDownloaderCLI is in the same directory as this script. You'll also need to do any attribute (font size, etc) tweaking directly in the bash script itself.

+++

Eventually I’ll get around to putting this thing on github, but til then, if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to hit me on Instagram @dexdigi.

CHROME EXTENSION

un-transcender

a browser extension that went a little viral. You can read about it in Splinter here:

This Chrome extension replaces ‘transcended race’ with ‘was retroactively deemed safe by white people’

When beloved celebrities of color die, there’s a particular way that the media likes to remember them that lauds the deceased’s legacy of somehow having “transcended” their race.

SplinterThe A.V. Club

the extension is now deprecated and probably won't be updated, but if you'd like to look at the code anyway, it's here.