Video Content Scraping

Crawling and Extracting Video Files from Websites

Today there is a lot of video content on the web. Video format is the most convenient media format for most people to understand. The most common purpose of scraping video content from websites is using it for machine learning purposes, especially for speech recognition and computer vision tasks.

At DataOx, we extract video files using the following process.

First, the client tell us the types of videos they want to scrape:

• topic
• duration
• size/quality
• format
• web sources (if known)

If our client knows the websites where the videos can be found and extracted, we request a list of these web sources and extract video links (URLs) from each given website. Then we download the video files to our database. Note: the DataOx team works only with publicly available web sources.

If the web sources are not known, we set up a web crawler that searches Google and goes to other websites to find videos that match the requirements.

After we store the video files, they can be parsed, analyzed, and operated according to the client’s project. For computer vision tasks, videos should be labeled—each object will be recognized by humans before computers would be trained to do such recognition by themselves. Video files also can be categorized according to different criteria.

YouTube Scraping

Another topic is extracting data from YouTube. It contains millions of movies as well as other viable data. The DataOx team has solutions that allow you to monitor YouTube channels on a regular basis. For example, you can get a lot of information about your competitors from YouTube:

• dynamic subscribers
• dynamic viewers
• frequency of video uploading
• analysis of movie topics
• comments for videos
• related videos and channels
• ratings

One nuance you should consider when scraping video files is their size. You will need a lot of space to store video content after it is scraped. And of course you should know about copyrights and other limitations if you decide to post videos on your website.

DataOx can provide either scraped video files as a data service or we can develop a web application that allows you to manage the process. To know more about scraping video content, schedule a free consultation with our expert.