Huffduffing video

You know what would be awesome? If you could huffduff the audio from videos on YouTube, Vimeo, and other video hosting sites.

To give you an example, A List Apart recently started running online events and once the events are over, they pop ‘em onto YouTube. Now, I’m not saying I don’t want to look at those lovely faces for an hour, but if truth be told, it’s the audio that I’m really interested in.

In the past, my only recourse would’ve been to pester the good people at A List Apart to export audio as well as video, in much the same way as I’ve pestered conference organisers in the past:

I wish conference organisers would export the audio of any talks that they’re publishing as video. Creating the sound file at that point is a simple one-click step. But once the videos are up online—be it on YouTube or Vimeo—it’s a lot, lot harder to get just the audio.

Not everyone wants to watch video. In fact, I bet there are plenty of people who listen to conference talks by opening the video in a separate tab so they can listen to it while they do something else.

Some people have come up with clever workarounds to get the audio track from videos into Huffduffer but they’re fairly convoluted.

Until now!

The brilliant Ryan Barrett has just launched huffduff-video:

He has created a bookmarklet you can use whenever you’re on a YouTube or Vimeo page that you want to huffduff. It works a treat—I’ve already used to huffduff that A List Apart event and a talk by Matt Jones.

It takes a little while to do the initial conversion but you can just leave the pop-up window open while it works its magic. I’ve incorporated it into the Huffduffer bookmarklet now too. So if you’re on a YouTube or Vimeo page, you can hit the usual bookmarklet and it’ll route you through Ryan’s clever creation.

That’s makes two fantastic pieces of software from Ryan that have improved my online life immeasurably: first Bridgy and now huffduff-video. So nifty!

Have you published a response to this? :

Responses

stream.boffosocko.com

I’ve always loved @huffduffer! @weegee asked a question that I’ve always struggled with. @schnarfed has already built the answer - naturally. Kevin’s (happy birthday by the way) question: “So recently I’ve been using the “Interview” and “lecture” subreddits to find all sorts of great interviews and profiles. However, many of them are in video form on Youtube/Vimeo and the like. Is there any way to huffduff a video to “listen” to? I don’t feel I need to see a lecturer at a podium or interview subject on a couch to get what I’m looking for.” I’m not sure why I’m surprised anymore, but it seems like every time I find some really useful bit of web technology, it’s coming out of the extended IndieWeb “Camp” (pun moderately intended). Thanks @adactio and @schnarfed for making my life easier and better. I do feel a bit cheated that I didn’t actually find the functionality directly on Huffduffer (or just noticed that it now somehow works with my long-loved Huffduffer bookmarklet). I wonder what other goodness I’m somehow missing out on… (Anyone can feel free to send me a list of their favorite services and other bookmarklets.)

# Friday, August 7th, 2015 at 3:08pm

1 Share

# Shared by Jason M. Klug on Tuesday, March 10th, 2015 at 3:13am

2 Likes

# Liked by Ethan Marcotte on Monday, March 9th, 2015 at 12:24pm

# Liked by Ryan Barrett on Monday, March 9th, 2015 at 12:41pm

Previously on this day

11 years ago I wrote Crawlbar

Say it with me.

15 years ago I wrote Perfect timing

Just in time for South by SouthWest, the Washington post has published an article called “Texas Eat ‘Em” about barbecue in the Lone Star State:

16 years ago I wrote We'll always have Paris

I’m back from my weekend in Paris.

18 years ago I wrote Trout Thursday

Only 327 days to go.