Miguel Carrasco's Real World

How to Download a YouTube Video to your computer

Ever wanted to save that favorite YouTube video to your local computer?  I have wanted to do this for a while now ever since I started using Media Center more and more.  I have most of my videos in a video folder, however all my favorite YouTube videos were on the internet, so I was forced to minimize my Media Center, load up IE7, load YouTube, etc.  I just wanted to have them ready to play in case people came over!

Although some people might have you believe this is a difficult task, it’s actually very simple.  Below I outline the easiest way to rip a YouTube video to your local computer.

1. Load your favorite YouTube video.
2. Copy the URL from the address bar.
3. Go to RipZor.com
4. Paste the URL into the textbox and click "Get Video".
5. The website will generate a flash file for you to download.
6. Click on the "Click Here" link to download the flash file, it will save as an flv file.

At this point as long as you have a flash viewer on your computer, you will be able to play this saved file, without having to connect to the internet, or having to go to the YouTube website!  What if you want to play them in Media Center?  You will need to convert this file to sometime of video format that is supported in Media Center.

The simplest way to do this is to download this zip file.  It includes a program that will convert your newly created flash file to mpg format.  Here are the easy to follow steps.

1. Download the zip file here.
2. Extract the zip file to a folder on your computer and run flvconverter.exe
3. Click Add Files and Browse to the location of your flv file you just converted.
4. Choose an output folder by clicking the browse button.
5. Click "Process"

You should now have a mpg file on your computer that you can play at any time!  Most importantly, you can add this to your video library on your Media Center without having to load YouTube!

facebook Explosion

I don't really remember the last time I saw a website explode like facebook has in the last two months.  For those that are unfamiliar with facebook, facebook is a social networking website originally developed for college and university students, but has recently been extended to anyone that wishes to join the site!  There was some controversy over this, however it has been a phenomenal boom to facebook, and will help the company make the site even better!

The site currently has over 18 million registered users, and is actually more popular than flickr for uploading images (The site currently has over 6 million images uploaded daily)!  facebook differs greatly from Myspace!  The major difference is the inability to customize the colours, html, css, etc of the facebook interface.  I love this as it makes it so much easier to get right to the point when looking at your friends pages, without having to try and read purple text on black backgrounds.

facebook is also not polluted with people looking for dates, relationships, and advertisers spam coming in from every direction.  The ability to quickly see what your friends are up to, organize events, upload and tag images, and post various types of media to your site is just amazing.  The News Feed is also a great page that keeps you up to date with your friends and family in a quick glance!

Generating over 1,000,000 dollars weekly, 30 billion page views per month, facebook is definitely about ready to be acquired.  Will Google snap up another one?  Or will Microsoft finally "win" one with the purchase of facebook?  Either way, the days of logging into MySpace for me are over.