Recently I was asked how to download a YouTube video and save it to a USB flash drive that could be played in a Technology Classroom.
The downloaded video files are generally in FLV format (Flash Video) which is an Adobe standard for video compression that has become the web standard for delivering online video (replacing Apple QuickTime, AVI, Windows Media and Real rm formats). Why? because Flash Video can be viewed inside Macromedia Flash Players which is shipped by default with most web browsers. The Problem? The FLV files have to be converted to another format if they are downloaded and viewed on your computer (or in this case a technology classroom).
As I was looking around I found a new program (new to me) at http://www.mediaconverter.org/ that allows you to download the file directly from YouTube (or Dailymotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, LiveVideo, Blip.tv and others) and convert it online.
I tested it using a YouTube VLOG file from a classmate and found that it has different saving options (I chose .mov for a Quicktime file but if you are going to use it in a PC technology classroom at the College you might want to use a .avi file instead since I am not positive that they have installed a FLV viewer on the classroom image and the default is likely to be Windows Media for the PC Technology Classrooms and Quicktime for the Apple Technology Rooms)
The conversion took about 10 minutes (for the download and conversion – so if you use this you might want to open it up and get it started and move to something else while it is working).
Some things to note:
- The quality is compressed so that you can fit it on a USB key ( the test file was 13meg – given this, the video won’t look good full screen)
- If you need full screen quality you should really download the file to your computer and convert is using a video file conversion program or download a FLV player to your laptop. I suggest
- Mozilla’s video-downloader add-in to capture the video. It can be downloaded at: http://lifehacker.com/software/downloads/download-of-the-day–video-downloader-firefox-extension-170659.php)
- iSquint for converting the files. iSquint can be downloaded at: http://www.isquint.org/
- FLV Player to view downloaded videos from your local machine. Another nice alternative is the Riva FLV player.
Curious? Take a second to look at 10 Interesting Things You Can Do with YouTube or Google Videos. The article includes helpful tips on find free Flash (FLV) players and provides advice on how to split a large FLV file into smaller playable video clips.