Background
I am not really a big fan of YouTube. It might be a great site for sharing videos but I personally don’t like the quality of video on YouTube. Most of these are flash videos .flv files. I found one useful thing for my personal use though. For my nephew and my daughter I found some nice videos of nursery rhymes on YouTube.
YouTube Downloader and file convertor
You can watch all the content on YouTube. But many a times its a painful experience if the broadband connection speed is low and due to buffering there might be delay in playing the whole video in one go. By default there is no option to download the video from YouTube. There are many programs which allow you to download this content.
One such program is Internet Download Manager which integrates into browser and adds a button everytime a video is played from YouTube.
Another option that I prefer to use is the YouTube downloader. This small utility has an option to paste the YouTube URL and save the content locally. It can also convert from one format to another a previously downloaded file. Here is a screenshot of this utility
The YouTube downloader utility does not have an option to convert the flv files into AVI file. It converts the flv files into MP4 format. Many of the media players support MP4 format but by LG LCD TV does not recognize it. As a result I cannot play these on my LCD TV.
As a result I needed to look for another utility which could convert the flv or mp4 to AVI format. A bit of Google search and I found a useful free utility.Pazera Free FLV to AVI convertor - http://download.cnet.com/Pazera-Free-FLV-to-AVI-Converter/3000-2194_4-10786669.html. There were one two other utilities I found but there were limitations like they could not convert from flv files to other formats if the video length was more than 3 minutes. Pazera convertor does not have such limitation. Compared to others I thought it was bit slow but then as long as it sufficed my requirement of converting the whole file I am not going to complain too much about the speed. Here is a screenshot of this utility
One more thing I like about the YouTube downloader is its ability to pick the URL from clipboard when you hover over the textbox where the URL needs to be pasted. All you have to do is copy the URL and hover over this textbox. YouTube downloader will pick it up immediately. These are small little things but they really help in enhancing the user experience.
Conclusion
Both these utilities are lightweight and helpful ones. We can use them not just with YouTube videos but with any other compatible formats as well. If there are better utilities than these I would like to know them.
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