When I was cruising around the web early this morning I saw an announcement that Vine was finally shutting down and January 17th (a.k.a. yesterday) is the last day to download your videos. I was a bit bummed because I created about 30 Vines that I wanted to archive. Fortunately they were still there, but unfortunately I could no longer get a downloadable archive from Vine. I’m sure those folks who are not Vine dilettantes like me got their stuff off in a timely manner. But I only used Vine for the UMW Console project (and a couple of personal outings) back in 2015, so the deadline for archiving fell off my radar. But once faced with the possibility of losing the videos, they quickly became invaluable memories waiting to be lost forever 🙂 Although, I think what bothered me most was the idea that 20 or so Vines across various blog posts would leave a huge, gaping embeddable media hole on the bava blog.
So I spent much of this morning using savedeo.com to grab my Vines (as well as those of folks whose vines I had embedded on my site). Savedeo worked well, but keep in mind it will try and get you to click ads and install crap, so you need to navigate that minefield. That said, it’s pretty simple to use, just put qq before the URL of any Vine video’s permalink and you will be redirected to a site that offers you various quality downloads of the video, much like PWN Youtube does.
I did that for about 40 videos, so I now have a full archive of all the Vines embedded on this blog. I was considering uploading them all to Flickr and embedding those videos, but given my growing fear of having to archive and move them yet again, I am leaning towards finding a video player that acts like Vine and serving them directly from my blog given none of them are over 3 MBs.
But as you may have gathered from this post, they did not disable embeds from Vine just yet, so I figured I would enjoy the service while it lasts and share some Vines I took one day while toy antiquing in Fredericksburg during the Spring of 2015.