why can you easily download pictures from most websites, but can’t right click and download videos?
In: Technology
Most images on websites are simple your web browser gets told “Here is a link to an image file please display it in this location” than the browser has a built-in function that just saves the image to storage if you ask it to. However videos are more complicated.
whilst you can simply embed a video file [Like shown in this example](https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_video.asp) that would allow a user to right-click to download the video web developers often decide to use other methods. for example Youtube uses their own video player and as it isn’t a standard feature of the web browsers don’t know how to save the content. unlike with a simple video embed, a Youtube video is streamed to the client in pieces in YouTubes own format; there is no file to just save. Many videos on other websites just embed a Youtube video this saves the load on the website as they don’t need to send you the video just a link.
The whole picture is sent to you all at once, which is why you see the whole picture instead of just half of it. So you can just save it…because your web browser *already has it*.
The whole video is not sent to you all at once. A few seconds at a time are steadily sent to you on a constant basis – that’s what “streaming” means. Your web browser cannot just save the video all at once because it doesn’t have the whole video all at once.
On many websites you can’t right click to download photos. Some websites and programs won’t allow you to screenshot their content either. More companies were more concerned with video piracy than image piracy because it represents a greater financial loss.
A long time ago (in Internet time) that actually was the case. HTML, the code which makes webpages, natively supports embedding all sorts of media, as long as the computer loading the page can play it (in the past, it would use apps like Windows Media Player and QuickTime to handle the computer side of things).
This worked okay, but didn’t protect videos so anyone could download any video. You can imagine that Disney wouldn’t want you to be able to download videos from their site. It also meant slower video loading. Now sites like YouTube store different quality of video and pick the quickest loading version (lower quality means smaller file) but also put the video in a custom player that they can restrict the ability to download it and put ads in.
It should be noted that any savvy nerd with google and a bit of know-how totally *can* download most videos from the internet to a file on their computer. Sites like YouTube have convenient utilities that will grab a video with a single command, but with the right HTTP headers, the url of the m3u8 file, and ffmpeg, you can grab most any video stream.
The even savvier nerds, armed with some yarrrr software, can even download video streams encrypted with DRM. At the end of the day, it’s just data being sent to your computer.
But as others have pointed out, most sites these days don’t send you the video all at once in a way that’s convenient for the average user to download, instead only loading bits and pieces as you need them.
With modern unprotected HTML5 videos you can just right click and save a video like you would an image.
However a lot of video content is uses an embedded video player that streams video content stored outside of the page. This means the player controls what right click does and your access to the original file.
While the other posts are technically correct about how video is streamed in pieces, making it intentionally difficult to download as a file, the truth is theoretically and technically you CAN download anything displayed in your browser, but you’ll need a third party plugin to do so. These tend to fall afoul of licensing agreements, so get kicked out of app stores, or their technical method gets superseded by technical changes to the streaming service. So you have to update them frequently. But they do work, I use them from time to time.
There’s also a technology a lot of website’s video players use that’s essentially requesting tiny fragments of the video as they’re needed to be shown as opposed to just showing the video as an embedded object like an image. This does have some advantages besides making it difficult to just right click and save it, for example, adjusting quality based on average connection speed.
Latest Answers