Flash (.flv) to iTunes Video File (.m4v)
Friday, December 25th, 2009Visiting the family at the farm and sitting on the end of a 1M/1M Microwave link. Normally this is ok bandwidth and adequate latency. Throw 18 laptops, couple iTouch, couple iPhones -and- a blizzard and you have little bandwidth and even worse latency!
Speedtest.net shows our lovely 1M/1M link is down to 0.33M/0.21M and 2083ms latency! Of course I had this vision of catching up on some Raid Fight videos on YouTube.
Streaming YouTube wasn’t happening. So, I needed to download YouTube videos and play them locally. Thought this would be easy, but had to jump through some hoops.
I believe saving YouTube locally breaks the ToS so take that with what it’s worth. Use your googleFU to figure it out yourself and read other people’s warning messages.
The tool I found that worked best for snarf’n the YouTube video and saving it to disk is iSkySoft’s Video Downloader for Mac. Hit the previous link for how to use it. Drop dead simple.
By default you’ll get a .flv in “~/Movies/Free iTube Resource”, now I want iTune Video, so I used HandBrake to convert the flash files.
Worked like a charm.

