Gradual Panic!

I know that this is video is using old tech but it’s tech just the same and I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to show it to you guys due to its sheer awesomeness!

I’ve been asked about this sooo many times over the last couple of months that I thought it was about time that I wrote this ‘how to’. There is no disagreement that YouTube is a fantastic media resource and great fun to watch. But what if you want to use that content elsewhere? How do you get hold of it? What do you do with? How? Here’s how…

1. First of all you need to decide which video you’d like to download so visit it’s page on YouTube. For this example I’ll be using a video I created for my MJ site a couple of months ago which you can view here.
2. To the left of the video please note the 2 sections labelled URL and Embed. Now in the URL is the link for the video, you need to copy this to paste in a sec. Please also note the Embed section though. This normally contains the code to post it in your own web site but authors can disable this. If it says ‘embedding disabled by request’ then this video will not work with this process.
3. Now open a new window or tab in your browser and visit KeepVid.com and paste your copied YouTube URL into the textbox at the top of the site and then press download.
4. You will then be presented with 3 links (FLV low and medium quality and a high quality MP4 video). Simply click on the one you fancy and it’s all yours.
5. So what to do with your video now? If you want to shove it in your PowerPoint presentation then FLV and MP4 video aint that friendly, so you’ll need to convert it. For that you’ll need FormatFactory, a free media converter that converts anything to anything.
6. So say you want to convert your video to WMV (the friendliest format for PC PowerPoint) simply open the program. Select the video option and then ‘all to WMV’.
7. Select the quality and size that you’d like to output to be, select the file you’d like to convert and it will be added to the queue (you can batch convert a number of files at once).
8. Once the files are in the queue simply press convert and hey presto your format friendly video is ready to use (by default the program places the video in a folder called FFoutput in your documents folder).

Please note that there are many other ways to do this but this is my tried and tested method. What could be simpler?