Converting YouTube video to iPod video must be one of the most popular question that I get asked thanks to the success of YouTube and the iPod. The process itself is extremely easy, so you don’t need any ’special plugins’ or browsers of any kind, all you need is a video conversion application; everything else MacOS X provides.

Before we get started, we need a piece of software that will actually convert the YouTube Flash video to MP4, the format use by the video iPods. The software that we are going to use is called iSquint and it is Freeware. Download the latest version and install the application to your computer.

Now you are ready. You have everything that you need.

Process

1. First, open the Safari web browser application. Surf over to YouTube and find the video that you want to download. For this tutorial, we are going to illustrate the downloading and conversion of the music video “You can call me Al” by Paul Simon.

2. Let the video completely download. Then, in Safari, go to the menu bar and select: Window -> Activity, or press Command-Option and A. This brings up the Activity Monitor which shows you what Safari has been downloading, and more importantly, where from.

3. Within the Activity Monitor list is the URL (the Internet address) for the video itself. You are usually looking for the biggest file that is there in the list and also, the URL will be completely different from the rest because the video will come from a different server.

4. Select the video URL with your mouse, and press Command+C for ‘copy’. This will copy the URL to the clipboard.

5. Create a new tab or window and paste (Command+V) the URL in to the address bar and press ‘Enter’. This will start the download. Don’t worry about the file name for now, seeing ‘get_video’ in the Download Manager is normal.

6. Once the download is finished, you will see a blank document called ‘get_video’.

7. All you have to do now is simply rename the document, but making sure that the file extension .flv is at the end. This is most important! So, for this example, “Paul Simon - You Can Call Me Al.flv”

Conversion

1. Now that you have the YouTube Flash video, it’s just a simple matter of converting it. As mentioned before, we will be using a Freeware application called iSquint. Open the iSquint application and ‘drag and drop’ the Flash video into the application.

2. You may want to change some of the settings, but by default, there is nothing wrong with them. You can change them if you wish, but only change them if you know what you are doing.

3. Once you are happy with the settings, click ‘Start’. The time is takes all depends on the length of the clip and the speed of your computer, the application will give you an estimate of how long it will take.

4. By default, ‘Add to iTunes’ is off, so you might want to check the check box for ease of use, otherwise you will have to add the movie by default. Unfortunately, there is no META data for the video, so the video will appear in you Movies playlist within iTunes, and it will appear as your filename.

5. Select the video within the playlist in iTunes and press Command+I to edit it’s META data and ID Tags. To make the video appear in your Music Videos playlist, you need to select the ‘Video’ tab and select ‘Music Video’ in the pull down menu.

6. Once that is done, you can then sync your video to your video iPod.

All done :o)

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