Put YouTube videos on your iPod

A couple of times a week, I like to browse through YouTube and download a handful of the latest "must see" clips on my iPod to share with my wife (who just does not have the patience to wade through all the tricks of skateboard park games, fighting and "teen" diaries). It used to be a bit 'of a chore to download and convert video, but over the last few months, a flood of small helper applications have hit the Internet.

Actually I plan to go around to recommend some of the programs to download YouTube here, but every time I sit down to start writing, I realize that as a Mac user, it is difficult for me to recommend a program for most of My readers, who are Windows users. Yesterday, Lifehacker recommended a website that not just any YouTube video download Flash files, but also converts it to your choice of five different formats, including MP4 iPod. Vixi.net 's FLV Converter online is incredibly easy to use, and works directly from your browser. Just enter the URL of the web page of the video, select the format you wish to convert and press the start button. The download and conversion are surprisingly quick, and once finished Vixi automatically download to your computer. Simple.

There is a ton of good content on YouTube, but claims copyright infringement and DMCA take-down notices mean that any given video can disappear at any time. Having a local copy of the video means you will not lose access if YouTube removes the video from their site. And if you convert the video into MP4 format, you can transfer them to your iPod as well.

In this way seems to be in accordance with the terms of use YouTube, until distribute videos to others, and you keep any copyright notice on file (see sections 2A and 4).

There are two excellent free services that take YouTube videos, download to your hard drive, convert them to MP4 format and add them to iTunes. For Windows users, try iTube, available here. Mac users must use PodTube, although it requires the use of Safari.

If you want to get access to the file and view directly (VLC media player plays Flash-Video format files) and / or convert it to another file format, you can download any YouTube video using Oyoom, or try the version of Firefox extension called Video Downloader. We also wrote our own tool to download YouTube videos, available on this page, and is also embedded below. Just enter any YouTube video URL and hit the "Get Video" button.

Once you have the file. FLV videos on your hard drive, view it with VLC, or convert to another format. For Windows users, try Replay Converter. For Mac users we recommend iSquint. There are also some on-line file conversion, but are not as reliable as desktop software and you have to wait for both upload and download....