Convert YouTube Videos for iPod Touch – Mac OS X

Posted on January 2, 2008
Filed Under Gadgets | 6 Comments

As mentioned in this earlier article a lot of fun for the iPod Touch comes with the videos you can watch anywhere anytime.

trailer

And as stressed before I happen to love the TEDTalks and Google Tech Talks and much much more stuff available on YouTube.

Now these movies tend to be a little long and during work they are so hard to follow as people have a bad habit of disturbing me while I’m watching videos at work ;)

So I figured the best way is to get the videos on my iPod and watch them while waiting at the airport, sitting on the tube or bus. Only problem is how do I download and convert the YouTube videos to work on my iPod Touch. (The tutorial works for all third generation iPods with video capabilities and of course for the iPhone)


Tuboy Juego
(Download Client OS X)

tboy

First You will need to  download the .flv YouTube video file using a tool like Tuboy Juego it will simply allow you to download the video file of the page currently open in Safari or you can alternatively use the v=xxxx video ID from YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TpRAp0WWLs in this exmple 4TpRAp0WWLs)

The tool will open a shell and show the progress of the download.

shell


ffmpegX
(Video converter OS X)

Once the .flv file is on your hard disk its time to convert the file into a format  supported by your iPod Touch. Here you might want to use a tool like ffmpegX

ffmpegx

Just install it and then drag and drop the .flv file downloaded from YouTube to the From filed on the GUI. On the Target format section choose the MP4 H.264 format.

After the conversion is finished just add the file to the movie section to iTunes. Sync your iPod or iPhone and you are set to enjoy the YouTube video on the go.

UPDATE: After downloading the .flv file from YouTube the easier way to convert the file to an iPod / iPhone Video file is to use iSquint – iSquint may not be as flexible in terms of supported media types overall but for this use case it just works brilliantly even way faster than ffmpegX on my intel MacBook Pro.

 

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    • Comments

    6 Responses to “Convert YouTube Videos for iPod Touch – Mac OS X”

    1. How To - Install iPhone and 3rd Party Applications on your iPod Touch : Locally Type* on January 4th, 2008 2:24 pm

      [...] iPod Touch is a very neat and shiny gadget and great to watch YouTube movies with on the Go, but it lacks some of the nice applications the iPhone has – now you can’t [...]

    2. mikeNo Gravatar on February 20th, 2008 8:41 am

      I use “TubeTV”, a freeware that does everything to get youtube videos for use on ipod. Set the preferences to ipod format. Then use it to browse or search youtube. When you find a video you like then simply click the save button. It downloads the flv file then automatically converts it to a .m4v file ready for your ipod.
      http://www.chimoosoft.com/products/

    3. Icey540 on May 26th, 2008 1:13 pm

      I second Mike’s recommendation for TubeTV. It’s a 1-stop shop when it comes to selecting a YouTube clip and then converting it to a mpv format ready to play on your IPOD device. It’s an excellent app.

    4. kyleeNo Gravatar on October 14th, 2008 8:58 pm

      so ,i don’t quite understand what im suppose to do here .
      does this cost money ?
      or like, im really confused.

    5. Anonymous on January 1st, 2009 7:26 pm

      is this illegal? if not, than this really helped me

    6. DRM RemovalNo Gravatar on January 5th, 2009 7:19 am

      Thanks, ffmpegX works really great:)

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