A couple of times weekly, I prefer to search YouTube and download a few current “surely travel to” clips onto my iPod to give to my wife (who just doesn’t have the patience to battle through every one of the skateboard tricks, playground fights, and “teen” diaries). It was 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 net.

I’ve actually been significance bypass to recommending a range of the YouTube download programs here, but every time I sit to begin with writing I realize that being a Mac user, it’s difficult for myself to recommend a course for almost all of my readers, who will be Windows users. Yesterday, Lifehacker recommended an internet site that not only downloads any YouTube Flash video file, but additionally converts it into your selection 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 your video’s webpage, find the format you need it transformed into, and press the first step button. The download and conversion are surprisingly quick, and once it’s finished Vixi automatically downloads it to your personal computer. Simple.

There’s a mass of good content on YouTube, but copyright infringement claims and DMCA take-down notices mean any specific video can disappear at some point. Getting a local copy of many video means you would not lose access if YouTube removes the motion picture by consuming a site. And if you exchange the video to MP4 format, you can transfer them your iPod as well.

Implementing this looks like in compliance with YouTube’s Regulations of Use, provided you don’t distribute the videos to others, and you also retain any copyright notices at the files (see sections 2A and 4).

There happen to be two excellent free services that take YouTube videos, download these to your hard drive, convert each of them MP4 format and add them to iTunes. For Windows users, try iTube, available here. Mac users should use PodTube, due to it requires the utilization of Safari.

If you just would like to get admission to the file and view it directly (the VLC media player will play flash-format video files) and/or convert this maker to another file format, you can download any YouTube video using Oyoom, or consider the Firefox extension called Video Downloader. We’ve also written our own tool to download YouTube videos, transferrable to this page, and it’s also embedded below. Just enter any YouTube video URL and hit the “Get Video” button.

youtube video downloader free Once you have the .flv video in your hard drive, view it with VLC, or convert them another format. For Windows users, try Replay Converter. For Mac users we recommend iSquint. There’s also one or two online file conversion services, but they can also be not like reliable as desktop software and now you have to await for both the upload and also the download youtube video downloader free.