Downloading from YouTube in any format from any platform

Last weekend my Dad and I had the urge to watch some old school music videos from The Police. Knowing that everything that is video makes it to YouTube I immediately started there. We found everything, but then he was wondering if you could save these videos, possibly to an iPod.

Unfortunately, we were on my parent’s PC and the only software that I knew would work was PodTube, which of course is only for OSX. So when I got back to school I tried out PodTube on my Macbook Pro, but with little success.

Today, I found two websites that do everything you need to save YouTube videos in any format on any computer that has internet access.

Step One - Oyoom

Oyoom.com is a website that allows users to input a URL from YouTube and save the files on your computer in YouTube’s .FLV format. This took only a few minutes for my music video from The Police.

I can not play .FLV files on my Mac, nor do I desire to find a player that does support this. What I wanted to do was change this to a .MOV or .MP4 so I could import it into iTunes and play it on my iPod. That was pretty simple.

Step Two - Media-Convert

Media-Convert.com allows users to upload a media file, which it immediately recognizes and then convert that file to virtually any other format. I uploaded the .FLV music video and saved it as a .MP4 file.

I simply browsed my computer for the file, imported it, and MediaConvert did the rest. After converting it MediaConvert takes you to a download screen where I downloaded the video back to my hard drive.

Closing thoughts

After downloading the file I added it to my iTunes library and synced my iPod, adding the new file. It was incredibly easy.

Despite low quality when played full screen this file on my iPod looks great and it only took a few minutes to do.