Continue reading FormatFactory Kicks Media Conversion Ass and Takes Names
Sure, there are plenty of ways to grab a video from YouTube, save it as an flv file, and convert it the file format of your choice. But Zunemytube's got to be the simplest method I've seen so far.
We've known for awhile that functionality built into iMovie could strip the DRM from music purchased from the iTunes Music Store, but the process wasn't exactly point-and-click. Now, thanks to the wonder of AppleScript, that process has been streamlined, and you're only a few clicks away from listening to your whole music collection on your non-Apple device. FairGame is a free Mac app from Seidai Software that will convert the songs you select in iTunes to an open format. It's not lightning-quick--about 40 seconds for every minute of music--but it's free and gets the job done.
Media-Convert is a fairly impressive web service that will convert a file from one file format to another. That sounds pretty benign, but what's impressive is how many formats it supports. There's a good chance Media-Convert supports almost every document on you computer, including dozens of audio and video formats, a ton of common and obscure image formats, documents from Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and others, compressed archives, and more. One particularly neat trick it can do is convert PDF documents to Adobe Flash (SWF) movies. It can also capture web pages as images, convert Microsoft Access databases to Excel spreadsheets, and, in case you're into this sort of thing, convert text documents to morse code. Of course, it's not lightning-fast. You have to upload your file or enter the URL of a file and then wait awhile while it's converted, but far as convenience and price (free!) goes it can scarcely be beat.
From the quick and dirty tools category, FastStone image tools work well and don't ask many questions. There is the Image Viewer (which is a browser, image editor, and converter), Capture (a screen capture utility that captures almost everything on screen, even flash), MaxView (a image viewer), and Photo Resizer (a batch converter, renamer, resizer). I use both the Capture application and sometimes resizer when I have a lot of pictures all at once that I want to convert or rename. They aren't by any means Adobe quality picture tools, but they work fine, and the are cheap too. You can't get much cheaper than free.
TubeSock is a great-looking app for OS X that lets you save videos from YouTube and easily convert them for viewing on your iPod, FrontRow, or anywhere else. Freeware purists can skip over this one--it costs $15 if you want to be able to convert more than the 30 seconds of video allowed by the trial version--but the rest of you, read on: TubeSock integrates with Safari and Firefox, providing a "Show in TubeSock" button. When you're looking at a YouTube page you can press the button, which will open TubeSock with a preview of the video. Then there's a handy "Convert" button that will not only put the video in your desired format (H.264 by default, of course), but it will also send it to your device program of choice--your iPod, iTunes, or FrontRow. Very slick.
Need to create a PDF file? Don't want to bother downloading/buying/installing software to make PDFs, or stuck at a library or internet kiosk where you can't? Enter PDF Online. It's a free service that will convert (almost) any document you upload into a PDF file. It supports lots of file formats, including most Office documents (e.g. Word/DOC, Excel/XLS, PowerPoint/PPT), plus HTML and plain text files, and the most common image formats including JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, and PNG. All you have to do is upload your document with the PDF Online web form and enter your email address, and the PDF will be emailed to you. I tried it with an Excel file and I received the PDF in less than 30 seconds. The PDF looked good and even my Excel charts were displayed correctly. If you're feeling advanced you can also tweak a few options, like font embedding, security and watermarks, and image resolution and compression.
Unlike Google Video, YouTube doesn't have an option to download videos for playback on your iPod or PSP.
What's to be done? Happily, Lifehacker has a short
how-to on downloading those videos and converting them to an iPod/PSP-friendly format. It takes a bit of fiddling
in the form of a Greasmonkey script or bookmarklet to download the Flash video file and a third-party conversion tool
to make it work with your portable device, but the process is pretty straightforward.
Popular open source DVD ripping
app HandBrake has been available for Mac and Linux for some time now, and
has finally been ported to Windows. HandBrake is a slick
all-in-one ripping app that will encode your ripped video in MPEG-4 or H.264 (MP4, AVI, or OGM) and has a great
built-in calculator that takes the fuss out of choosing a bitrate, which is especially great if your video's
destination is an iPod or PSP. Hit the HandBrake forums
to get the Windows release.
TiVo has released a public beta version of new software that will convert TiVoToGo video to formats
playable on the iPod and Sony PSP. The software will automatically transfer your recorded TV shows to your iPod or
PSP while you sleep, which is a blessing because apparently the transcoding takes awhile—up to twice as long as
the video itself. The beta is free but when the final version is released it's expected to cost $15-30. You can sign up
to test the beta version of TiVo Desktop 2.4 at the TiVo web site.
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