Many people have been interested in taking their favorite Youtube videos by transferring them into their portable video players, while it can certainly be done it is a bit hard for those who have no experience whatsoever in video re-encoding, but the truth is that it doesn't have to be that difficult, just about anyone can do it.
Those who are lucky enough to have an iPhone can watch these videos anytime without the need to download and re-encode but those of us who don't still have some alternatives. The first thing you need to learn is that Youtube doesn't use standard video codecs such as WMV, AVI, MPEG, they are able to convert them into flash video (FLV) but they do not stream it in its original format.
The reason they do FLV is because this particular video container offers interactivity which is something other codecs don't. The first step is to find a site which will let you download the actual Youtube video, there are plenty of those sites around, simply do a Google search for the phrase "download youtube videos" and you should come up with quite a few sites which ask you for the URL of the video you want to download, after providing the URL you can click "download" and the site will strip the FLV and allow you to download it to your hard drive. This is 50% of the game, the next step is to find a tool that will let you encode the video in a standard container such as MP4 (iPods) or AVI (all other video players)
Riva FLV encoder is a good piece of free software (freeware) which allows you to take that FLV you just download it and quickly encode it into AVI or MPG for those advanced users this software features many functions to change the transcoding settings and audio settings. This is not the only tool available though, by simply doing a search for the phrase "FLV to AVI converter" you will find several other applications that do the same job. Once the video has been converted it is just a matter of dragging and dropping it into your portable player, by the way this process can be done with Google video or any other video sharing site.
