With millions of visitors per day, Onlinevideoconverter.com is the most-visited stream-ripping site on the Internet.
The service gained popularity by allowing users to convert and download videos from a wide variety of platforms, YouTube included.
The site has operated without any issues for years, but earlier this month something changed. YouTube decided to actively block servers of so-called stream-rippers, hoping to prevent these sites from facilitating “violative downloads.”
While this worked initially, many stream-ripping sites quickly found ways to circumvent the blockade. In many cases, switching to new IP-addresses did the trick, at least temporarily. This was also true for Onlinevideoconverter.com (OVC), which was fully operational again after a few days.
However, the team behind the site isn’t planning to keep up this fight. People who access the stream-ripper today will notice that YouTube downloads have stopped working again. A site representative informs TorrentFreak that this is intentional.
“In view of YouTube’s latest stance, we’ve decided to disable the conversion of all YouTube videos on our service,” OVC says.
For the time being the various YouTube references on the site remain intact. The site said that some of these will remain online for SEO purposes. It’s clear, however, that ripping and downloading YouTube videos no longer works.
The stream-ripping site notes that the decision was taken voluntarily and not after it was contacted directly by rightsholders or YouTube. OVC simply believes that it’s the best direction to take and it stresses that other downloading and conversion tools remain available.
“No one has reached out to us recently, we think it’s best for such a decision after YouTube’s latest effort,” OVC adds.
The music industry groups that have complained bitterly about the stream-ripping phenomenon will be happy with the decision, especially since OVC is the most popular stream-ripper out there. However, not all sites are ready to throw in the towel.
Mp3-youtube.download, for example, is vowing to do anything it can to keep the service available.
“I think the YouTube update is stupid because we will always find a solution,” the operator of Mp3-youtube.download told us, commenting on the issue.
This was to be expected, of course, as no blocking solution is perfectly effective. That said, the music industry hopes that enough services will become temporarily unavailable, to frustrate some people enough to give up.
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