How to retrieve content using grabber of already posted videos?

[AnSilva]

I used the grabber plugin and I was able to copy videos from other websites in embedded mode and launch them on my website.

The problem is that now I regret it and decided to grab those same videos again but instead of embedding them I want to download them!

Every time I try to re-grab a video that has already been published, the grabber plugin simply skips the video and it doesn't download it, even though I selected it for download instead of embedding it.

Is there a way to do this? Regrab already posted the video in embedded mode but in download mode, without the need to delete de video to regrab again?

[Tech Support]

It is not possible to update existing videos via grabbers. It can only import new videos. So the only way would be to delete the imported videos and re-import them again. But you will also have to enable this option in grabber settings to allow importing deleted videos again:

 

But then there may be another issue, if you don't like some videos that were imported by grabber and decide to delete them from your site, the grabber may import them again as new videos.

So there is no win-win situation here, better leave the old videos as embed and download new videos, or just delete them and import other videos instead.

 

[AnSilva]

I understood. Thanks for the reply. I think I'll leave the ones I already import, and import others. Thanks.

[Tech Support]

2 hours ago, Tech Support said:

But then there may be another issue, if you don't like some videos that were imported by grabber and decide to delete them from your site, the grabber may import them again as new videos.

I think this statement is not really true. You can actually do that without thinking about potential future issues. Because when you want to re-import some deleted content, you can enable this option, and when the import is done - disable back. You can export all videos that are embedded via videos export GUI, choose 2 fields:

1. Video ID
2. Video page URL (grabbers)

and under filters choose "Loaded as" = "Embed code". This will export IDs and grabber page URLs of all embedded videos from your site (I assume you want to replace ALL embedded videos). Then you can delete these videos like usual.

Then enable option in grabber to allow importing deleted videos and change grabber mode to download. Go to Videos import. In fields select the same fields and leave other options by default and upload the text file generated by export. This should start importing these videos with the same IDs that were before. This will give you the same URLs for them, so these videos will generate 404 errors only for the time between their deletion and their import.

After the import is done, you can disable back the option to allow deleted videos to be imported by grabber, as it was only needed for 1 time operation.

I would suggest you to try with 1 video first, and check how it goes before deleting all embed code videos.