Downloading Open Movies

Support Basics & Interface
1

This isn’t exactly a question about a tutorial. I want to download all the Blender open movies so I can go over them as a tool for learning and understanding. The issue is that I’m on rural internet and I have limited bandwidth. If I just wanted to watch them one time each, I might as well check them out on YouTube, but I want to be able to rewatch them and see them in high quality. (Often on rural internet, trying to watch any streaming video in higher resolution is not possible or difficult.)

I know there are programs to allow people to download videos from YouTube. Is that the best way to get a copy of an open movie?

I have been to The Open Movie page, but the links there are to YouTube for viewing and not for downloading the actual movies.

(Please, I do NOT want to get into a discussion about rural internet and options - I’ve spent months exploring that. I am signed up for Starlink, but until that is available here, I’m stuck with what we have.)

2

There is yt-dlp. Very powerful tool for getting everything you need from YT including downloading entire playlists / channels, renaming files, changing codec, format, resolution etc.

This tool is native for Linux but on the official github page there are executables for Windows too:

3

So the best way is likely going to be to just scrape them from YT instead of a straight download?

4

yt-dlp can download movies from YT in their original size before YT optimization so in terms of quality you won’t miss anything.

As for official channel how to download movies I have no knowledge. Maybe someone closer to Blender Studio might chime in.

5

There are some of them uploaded available to download (ripped from Youtube) here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Blender_movies

and

The official way that will give You best quality is by buying Blender Cloud Subscription
and downloading original files eg. https://pillar.blender.cloud/p/spring/5ce6a8aea722225ec2c3c91f
And that will also prove You access to production files

6

When I get all the major work I have to do on our lot completed, which should be within the next few months (depending on weather, especially how wet things are), and we get Starlink (I have a due date, but we had due dates last year, too), I’ll be looking into a subscription. Until then - both my lack of time and poor bandwidth make it impractical.