The video is for real. They just forgot to show the power supply . I noticed that the power distributor did not shift around on the table - not even when devices were plugged in or out. That is a tiny bit suspicious.
I have seen quite a few free energy devices. A colleague is about to build a new one currently. He already made half a dozen almost work. Without fail the devices I have been shown so far had flawed assumptions for the proof of concept or deliberately (?) faulty math in the calculation of the amount of energy they harvest. One of my favorites is the joule thief driving a LED from an "empty" alkaline battery.
The bad thing about the free energy community is that they show serious signs of sect behavior and many members have just enough education to fall for pseudo science.
The reason for the failure of free energy devices is usually attributed to a conspiracy. You may only guess how mighty the conspirators are as even mother nature supports the conspiracy by delivering inferior materials and modules that lack the desired properties .

Am I missing something, or is this just the contemporary version of the perpetual motion machine? We happen to live in a universe with no free lunch, and that applies to energy generation, too.

Yes, you are missing something. And those devices are or are not contemporary versions of the perpetual motion machine. That depends on whom you ask.
The original idea of Nicola Tesla was to harvest energy from neutrinos and other stellar radiation, which is freely available. That might be feasible and it would not violate any laws of physics. This idea met esoteric and pseudoscience. This is where the idea took a questionable turn. The members of the community are very persuasive and do not balk from calling engineers ignorant (or something less polite, which I wont repeat on a family friendly website) for predicting the behavior that can be experienced when building and operating those devices. Of course there are plenty of people who embrace the opportunity to make the money that´s in the business of selling plans for building the devices.
My policy is to steer clear of those folks. You cannot win and you should not risk getting sucked into that movement - you would not believe the amount of support and resources my colleague managed to solicit for his projects.

This is just a general comment, not aimed at anyone in particular.

This guy probably is a crank, but having said that, I have little patience for the many people out there, who using science as their support, dismiss things out of hand without testing. Our modern day trend in the "educated" community is to dismiss things out of hand that contradict our holy and sacrosanct theories of how things work, most of which have flaws and many are severely flawed. A common comment is "that can't work, doesn't that guy have any idea of scientific principles"

It is usually those "cranks" who try things, not based on theories, and occasionally discover something that is ground breaking in science. It is about time that the scientific community started to take nothing for granted and tested all areas of all the theories that we hold as fact (or almost so). If we did that we would have a new era in science.

One example to leave you with is gravity, it has the same effect on all falling matter right? WRONG!! But you say Galileo proved that at the leaning tower of Pisa! And Isaac Newton proved that using his Laws of Motion! You would only be partially correct.

Gravity works equally on bodies with inertias moving in the same direction. So two identical objects rotating at the same speed and falling, will fall at the same rate as each other, just as two non-rotating bodies will fall at the same rate. However a rotating body will always fall faster and for that matter rise faster than a non-rotating body. The greater it's diameter, mass and the speed of rotation, the faster it will fall and if it is thrown upward the faster it will rise.

Simply put Newtons laws that we take for fact are flawed in that they did not take into account rotating bodies and they do not apply to rotating bodies. Sorry Isaac! If you think I am wrong, then you had better do some research, and not from text books either as most text books are only mostly correct.

So I encourage all to question, and to test before condemning something that goes contrary to the way we think things work.

Is this observation due to the variances in the effect of gravity or air resistance?

Pete

This is to do with the way gravity acts on a rotating body. The ranger rockets back in the old days had large rotating stabilisers inside the cones and they enabled the rockets to go higher than the fuel that they carried allowed. (That was not planned but something that Werner von Braun noticed and tried to explain with future research)

You can also do a simple experiment, spin a ball bearing to full speed using a high speed power drill and launch it into the air with a stationary one. If you take video or strobed photos of the path of the balls you will see that the spinning one rises faster, goes higher and falls faster than the non-rotating one. Much higher than can be explained by air resistance.

Gravity and spin
I suppose one could take a couple simple gyroscopes, spin one and then drop both. I wonder how far they would need to fall to see a measurable difference. I also wonder if the difference (assuming there is a difference) is related to air resistance and the wobbling of the non-spinning object. So maybe we need to change out that gyroscope for a teflon ball with a super slick surface so that air resistance falls out...

$.02 -- just thinking out loud on my keyboard over my first cup.

Have you done that experiment?

No I haven't, I didn't have the strobe equipment (or a fast enough camera) needed to do the experiment, unfortunately. However, I have read reports by researchers who have, and the Ranger rocket anomaly is known in the history of rocketry.

There are reports of I think it was Bowing who have been doing research on anti-gravity aircraft for several years now, using a high speed rotating body of liquid supercooled metal to achieve some sort of gravity manipulation using this principle and perhaps others.

Good luck with the gyroscope test. You will have to get it fast (the ball bearing test used 27'000 RPM) and then stand well back, I hear those things off aircraft can throw you across the room.... A 20 foot drop should just about do it I would think. I would have something soft for them to fall into ....

Ya but . . . as I recall the purpose of the gyro was to stabilize the rocket (stop wobbling) and keep it pointed up. IMO reducing any wobbling would have the effect of reducing air resistance as the control fins would play a lesser roll. Every time a control surface is needed to control attitude it is necessarily increasing air resistance. With a gyro maintaining attitude, are control surfaces even required?