Geeky Mac

I have found that there are 2 good (free) ways to rip You Tube videos to your iPod. You may be asking why would you want to keep some of these videos, and if I find an answer I will let you know, but here’s how you do it anyway.

PodTube is awesome, easy, and fast. All you do is find the video you want in Safari, launch the app and tell it to go. Before you know it you have an MPEG 4 video ready for your iPod.

Unfortunately, there are a few drawbacks. You have to use Safari, it encodes in MPEG 4 instead of H.264, and you don’t have any control over the quality. However, we are not dealing with beautiful video to start with so, that is really not much of a catch.

The other method is a little bit more involved. You can read detailed instructions here, there is also some additional info on other methods. The method I like uses Safari and iSquint to make the conversion.

Step one is simple find the video on You Tube in Safari (for other browsers read the info here).

Then go to the Activity window in Safari (can be found under the Window menu or option command a). This part is slightly complicated. You must find the video file, but it should be the largest file listed. Once you find it double click on it and it will start to download.

Once it is done you will have a file named get_video. All you do is take that file into iSquint and encode. iSquint will give some control over the quality of the video and it runs nice and fast.

I tested both of these methods on my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro. Both were very quick and both applications are written in the universal binary so the are Intel Mac ready.