Retrieve Your YouTube Videos In Their Original Format Using Google Takeout

Adds the video service to its Data Liberation Policy.

Swagatam Mukherjee
11:41 28th Sep, 2012

Follow @sgtswagatam

Share this

Last year in June, Google came up with the Data Liberation Front, which had the mission statement "Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out". Towards this, they released Google Takeout — which allows you to download a copy of your data stored across Google services. Google has been adding various services to that list; this time it's YouTube. According to a post on Google's Data Liberation Blog, you can download all the videos you uploaded on your YouTube profile, in their original format, in a ZIP file.

Earlier, users had to use YouTube's Video Manager to download individual videos that had already been transcoded to various formats. Google now shows you the number of videos and file size once they have been compiled, and gives you a download link valid for seven days.

The service also lets you take back your data from +1s, Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Docs, Google+ Profile, Google+ Stream, Picasa Web Albums, and Voice.