YouTube is one of the amazing Internet success stories of the last few years. When it was introduced, Google Video and Yahoo Video were the top two video websites on the Internet, but it only took a few months before YouTube became more popular – by far – than the other two websites, combined.
YouTube is popular for a few reasons, chief among them being that YouTube enables regular folks to share their home videos, be they vacation videos or a video blog, with the world. You don’t need to know anything about setting up a website for yourself, nor do you need to worry about a domain name, bandwidth restrictions, or any of that. Simply set up an account, convert your video to the correct format, and upload it. Very soon, your content can be seen around the world.
And there’s a ton of good stuff on YouTube, so much good stuff that people want to share it. Of course, YouTube doesn’t necessarily want you to do that. YouTube makes its money off advertising revenue, so each time someone clicks on your video, YouTube gets a little cash. If people were able to download the video from YouTube, then a tiny part of YouTube’s revenue stream disappears.
Of course, people have figured out how to download just the video. There are quite a few utilities for this, and you can even install a Firefox extension that allows you to download a YouTube video (and videos from many other video sharing websites), with only a couple clicks.
The problem with many of these is that YouTube, and other websites, keep their videos stored as Flash Video files. These filse aren’t that common, and since most people don’t have a Flash Video player on their hard drive, once downloaded the file is oftentimes a bit useless. There are programs, such as MPlayer and VLC that can play Flash Video, but it would be great if there was an easy way to download and convert all those YouTube videos, in a single step, right?
Now there is! I recently saw a link for a program called PyTube. PyTube is a Python application which allows a Linux user (it appears there was originally the intent for this to be multi-platform, but at the moment only Linux is supported), to download a video from YouTube, and then, in the same step, convert it to another format, such as AVI, MPEG or OGG.
PyTube is really easy to use. Simply go to YouTube and find a video you want to download. Now, copy the URL from the URL bar of your web browser, and paste that into PyTube. Just below the PyTube URL bar, you’ll see a drop-down menu with format conversion options. Since PyTube is built against Mencoder, you are able to convert the Flash Video file into the aforementioned formats (AVI, MPEG or OGG), as well as strip just the audio into MP3, OGG or WAV. Once you’ve selected the convsion option (should you wish to convert… you can also leave the file as a Flash Video file), choose where to save the file. If you’re deciding to convert the video, the original Flash Video file will be deleted, but you can choose to keep it, if you wish.
Now, just hit the “Execute” button in the tool bar. You’ll see a progress notice pop up in the lower right corner of your screen, telling you that PyTube is downloading the video. Depending on how long the download takes, the program may appear to freeze, but don’t worry… it’s still downloading. Then, when the download is finished the conversion will start automatically. A new pop-up notice will appear informing you of this; when this notice disappears, the video is converted!
You can also use PyTube to convert any Flash Video file already on your hard drive to another format. Simply click the “Local File” button in the toolbar, and instead of a spot to input the URL, you’ll be asked to find the video you want to convert. Once you’ve selected it, just click to pick which format you’ll be converting to, hit the execute button and again, the process will start (without the downloading, of course).
I had recently tried out another YouTube downloading application, and it worked just fine for me, but I have to say that the added feature of actually converting the downloaded file into something more usable is a big bonus for me. Sure, it means that PyTube requires more programs to be present on the computer than if it was only a downloader, but I have those programs already, and the added features make that worth it.
So, if you’re a Linux user looking for an easy way to download and convert videos from YouTube, check out PyTube. It isn’t perfect (a batch feature would be amazing, so that I could simply put in nine or ten videos to download and convert, start the process and walk away), but it’s really good. As mentioned, you can check out PyTube at its home page.
