Other Sites

I'll admit, it took me a while to get into YouTube. I have no desire to watch videos of people's cats doing crazy things or witness a cell phone recording of some junior high kid falling down the stairs after a skateboarding trick gone wrong. There's a reason they call them "home" videos, my friends. Can you guess what it is?

But, YouTube has reached the point where a lot of the videos on there have become quite well done, and some are wildly entertaining. The content that takes up most of my time, however, are music videos and concert footage. Who needs VH1 Classic when you can turn to YouTube for all your 80s video needs?

But, do you really want to sit and watch music videos in front of your computer all day? No! You want to watch them on your iPod all day. Although YouTube doesn't allow you to directly download videos from their site, there are numerous ways to get around this. My favorite, at least for now, is the website vixy.net.

The sole purpose for this site—currently in beta—is to convert online FLV video and download it to your desktop. It handles everything for you, offering no options for compression other than the final file formats:

• AVI for Windows (DivX + MP3)
• MOV for Mac (MPEG4 + MP3)
• MP4 for for iPod/PSP (MPEG4 + AAC)
• 3GP for Mobile (MPEG4 + AAC)
• MP3 (audio only)

Those experienced with video/audio conversion and compression may be disappointed that they can't tweak the settings, but the lack of details is necessary for smooth, easy, automatic conversion. Plus, the settings here produce video that's just fine for the intended devices...depending upon the source video, of course.

So, how does it work? Simple. First, go to the site with the FLV video you want to convert. In this example, I'm using a live recording of Splitsville's "Yearbook." If there are multiple options available for your video, play through them all to see which offers the best sound. Although video is important (and most YouTube video looks really, really bad), compression artifcats are often lost on the small iPod screen. It's therefore better to sacrifice the video quality to get better audio, if necessary. Once you've settled on a source video, you'll need the full URL of the page on which the video sits, which you can grab from either the address bar of your web browser or from the URL field to the right of the video window.

Copy the URL, the visit Vixy.net. You'll see a large field labeled "URL." Paste the URL of your Flash video in this field, then select the file format for the converted video. For iPod use, you'll want to choose "MP4 for iPod/PSP (MPEG4 + AAC).

Click start, and let Vixy.net do its thing. It'll run through a couple of steps, then hopefully begin the conversion process. I say "hopefully" because it sometimes had trouble with the file I wanted to convert. I'm not sure if this was a YouTube issue or a problem with the particular video. Either way, the error only appeared a couple of times, and in one instance the video eventually worked just fine after I waited a bit and tried again. If all goes as planned, you'll see a progress bar like the one below.

When the video conversion is complete, the file should automatically download to your computer. If not, a download link is provided. It may be hard to recognize the file, though. After the conversion, the Splitsville video was labeled "8feaa7f0ed22785c4e256b79c5ed2c49.mp4." If anyone could write a song with a title like that and still fill it with infectious hooks and supreme power-pop sensibilities, it'd be Splitsville (or perhaps Tommy Tutone). But no, this song is called "Yearbook," so I renamed the file on the desktop and dragged it into iTunes.

Oh, that's the next step. To get the video to the iPod, you first have to get it into iTunes. This is simply a matter of dragging the file from your desktop into the iTunes library. Once there, iTunes will likely recognize it as a movie. You don't want it to be a movie, right? It's a music video.

Simple fix. Select the video by clicking on it once, then either hit Command+I on the keyboard or choose "Get Info" from the "File" menu. You can select the "Info" tab to enter all the appropriate information, which I always recommend (more on this in another Hands-On Mac article to come), but the important tab is "Video." Select that, and in the "Video Kind:" drop-down box, choose "Music Video." Your video will now recognized as such, and will be placed amongst the audio files by this band in your iTunes/iPod library...provided you entered the band information in the aforementioned"Info" tab.

All that's left is to drag the file from your iTunes library to your iPod library as you would your standard audio file, and you're done. YouTube to iPod in a matter of minutes, and you're now ready to rock out to some Splitsville. Which you should, by the way. They just released a "best of..." CD, which is available now from various sources, and which will soon be available at iTunes, I'd imagine.

Now, all of this comes with a couple caveats, of course. First, Vixy.net is donation-ware, meaning that if you use the service, you really should donate some money to its developer. If you don't, chances are pretty good you will burn in hell. I'm serious. Second, Vixy.net is just a website floating in the ether, and you know what tends to happen with such useful websites. To prevent this from occuring, I'll encourage you to not use the site a method of converting entire TV shows and such from YouTube. Use it for the content you can't get anywhere else. The good stuff. The forgotten 80s videos, the live band performances, and the cats taking baths, if that's your thing.

And again, for the love of all that's holy, donate.