avoiding dead youtube links on tumblelog

[DaSwede]

I've just started my own tumblelog at Tumblr and I know I'll be wanting to post thousands of YouTube clips there. I also know that YouTube users often remove their own posts or have them removed by the site, which will leave my tumblelog with a lot of dead links.

How do I best avoid this? It is possible to download from YouTube, isn't it - but the question is, would it help in this case. The instructions for posting a video link to my personal tumblelog are:

"This can be a URL from video sites like YouTube or Vimeo, or the raw Embed-tag from any video/flash site." .

..so that probably means I can't post a clip I've first downloaded, right?

If I'm wrong about that, and it would in fact be a good idea to download the clips: How do I do that?

I would be so very grateful for any help I can get here - but please use simple terms... Imagine a geek: I'm on the other end of that scale, and English isn't my language.

[Buenchico]

Tumblelog doesn't allow you to host any videos on its site. It only permits you to link to videos which are actually stored on other servers (e.g. on Youtube). So the only way you can do what you want is to copy the Youtube videos to your own space on a video-hosting site.

Youtube videos arrive on your PC in FLV format but most (possibly all?) sites which allow you to upload videos don't permit you to send them in this format. So you need to capture the Youtube video, in FLV format, and convert it to a format which you can upload to your own space on a server. For appropriate software, see here:
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Technology/Ques tion521195.html

Once you've captured the original Youtube video, in MPG or WMV format, you can then open your own account on a video hosting service (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo, Veoh, Dailymotion, etc) and upload the video. Then link to the video from your Tumblelog page.

This solution means breaching the copyright of the person who originally posted the video to Youtube (assuming that they held the copyright in the first place) but it's the only way that you can overcome the problem of dead links.

Chris

[DaSwede]

He he, I suspected my head would be spinning, and it is... but that's only because I'm not used to doing this kind of stuff. I can see that your reply will be extremely useful to me once I pull myself together. Thankyou very very much, Chris. (See, I can do the italics and the bold lettering!)