Put Youtube Movies On Your iPod

[Marjorie Martin]

A couple of times a week, I like to browse through YouTube and
download a handful of the latest "must see" clips onto my iPod to
share with my wife (who just doesn't have the patience to wade through
all the skateboard tricks, playground fights, and "teen" diaries). It
used to be a bit of a chore to download and convert those videos, but
over the past few months, a flood of little helper applications have
hit the Internet.
I've actually been meaning to get around to recommending a few of the
YouTube download programs here, but every time I sit down to start
writing I realize that as a Mac user, it's difficult for me to
recommend a program for the majority of my readers, who are Windows
users. Yesterday, Lifehacker recommended a website that not only
downloads any YouTube Flash video file, but also converts it into your
choice of five different formats, including iPod mp4. Vixi.net's FLV
Online Converter is amazingly simple to use, and works directly from
your browser. Just enter the URL of the video's webpage, select the
format you want it converted to, and press the start button. The
download and conversion are surprisingly quick, and once it's finished
Vixi automatically downloads it to your computer. Simple.
There is a ton of good content on YouTube, but copyright infringement
claims and DMCA take-down notices mean that any given video can
disappear at any time. Having a local copy of the video means you
won't lose access if YouTube removes the video from their site. And if
you convert the video to MP4 format, you can transfer it to your iPod
as well.
Doing this appears to be in compliance with YouTube's Terms of Use, as
long as you do not distribute the videos to others, and you retain any
copyright notices on the files (see sections 2A and 4).
There are two excellent free services that take YouTube videos,
download them to your hard drive, convert them to MP4 format and add
them to iTunes. For Windows users, try iTube, available here. Mac
users should use PodTube, although it requires the use of Safari.
If you just want to get access to the file and view it directly (the
VLC media player will play flash-format video files) and/or convert it
to another file format, you can download any YouTube video using
Oyoom, or try the Firefox extension called Video Downloader. We've
also written our own tool to download YouTube videos, available on
this page, and it's also embedded below. Just enter any YouTube video
URL and hit the "Get Video" button.
Once you have the .flv video on your hard drive, view it with VLC, or
convert it to another format. For Windows users, try Replay Converter.
For Mac users we recommend iSquint. There are also a few online file
conversion services, but they are not as reliable as desktop software
and you have to wait for both the upload and the download.