There have often been times, while travelling for long, boring hours, that we've wished we had the means of downloading and watching popular videos on youtube right in our mobile screen. Most people own largely 3gp enabled phones and the only way to watch videos on the fly is if the videos are pre-converted and transferred to the mobile beforehand. With a poor unlimited GPRS packages, it isn't quite as possible to stream from the Youtube Mobile site either. Then one day we came across ByWifi. This web-based video transcoding/conversion service has a strangely misleading name, but their service is without a doubt one of the most useful ones we've come across.

ByWifi lets you search,convert and download any youtube (and they've also added support for metacafe) video(s) from your mobile. You just enter a few keywords and do a search ( like this one on Cloverfield ). ByWifi will bring forth the results that match your query and give you two options. You can either stream the video in real-time or download it with the "Save It" dialogue. Usually there is a 2~4 minutes of conversion time while your video is put on queue. You can hit the reload button to see if the conversion has finished. When it has, the downloading can proceed. The video being downloaded is in the most common mobile video format AKA .3gp . So if you do have a phone that can play videos, there is almost a definite chance that the downloaded video will also be playable on your mobile . ByWifi sort of falls into the catagory of "Online Video Converters" like Flvix or Vixy. But the ability of it to do the all three basic steps, searching, converting and downloading, from your mobile really takes the cake.

However an unlimited/low-cost data plan is advised before you start downloading scores of videos with ByWifi as the downloads can be a bit data-intensive. ByWifi is accessible with your mobile at the generic address.