videos

A few days ago I made that huge post about how to use Mencoder to transcode FLV videos downloaded from sites like Youtube to MOV (Quicktime) format in order to import them into iTunes and then to your "i" device. As it turns out there is a bit more to it than I realized. I dug around a bit and found a script out there called podencoder but it only runs in Linux so that doesn't help everybody. I did try it out in my Linux virtual system and it worked swimmingly.

Mplayer can be used to play videos but it can also be used to strip out just the audio track to a WAV file. I figured this out one day because I wanted to have audio-only copies of some of my favorite Flight of the Conchords videos Youtube - songs that aren't on the Conchords album - to copy to my iPod.

I don't know how useful it really is, but I have a little method of grabbing videos from sites like Youtube, or any page with an embedded video, converting it to a Quicktime format and importing it into iTunes. This, of course, makes it so ultimatly I could copy it to an iPod for portable viewing.

Watch as a man does what every little kid on a swing thought was impossible but always wished were not.

[CollegeHumor via Gizmodo]