Yes you can get those videos

SLOAN Ranger

Whoever thought, four and a half years ago, that one of the most powerful forces in the world would be a place to show off home movies? In January 2005, "home movies" was a two-word synonym for boring.

 

Then Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim quit their jobs at PayPal, and wheedled $11.5 million in venture capital to establish a web site where you could click to watch a video of Mr Karim at the San Diego Zoo. Most people would cross Silom Road against a red light on Friday afternoon to avoid that.

In just over four years, YouTube has proved that if the pen is more powerful than the sword, the video beats the pen hands down.

In America, YouTube launched Barack Obama, and TV networks were forced to rely on YouTube for presidential campaign debates.

In Thailand, YouTube launched the current national debates on censorship and the lese majeste laws, and still drives them. If you want to watch all the videos of the Songkran violence, from Batman to army shooters, YouTube is your place.

Monks in Burma, dissidents in Tibet, women musicians in Saudi Arabia all love YouTube. Clerics in Iran, nationalists in Turkey and, well, probably John McCain (remember him?) hate it.

In two days, half a million Thais who wouldn't go near a mob meeting if you paid them daily food allowance watched a video of the country's fugitive ex-prime minister make a comment about how people "would not have to line up for 500 baht" if he were prime minister. YouTube had to turn off the comments, it got so heated.

And of course there is the power of YouTube to attract viewers who love cute. As I write, the "Charlie bit my finger" video of a happy baby tormenting big brother has had 98 million viewers. The "Evolution of Dance" video ranks Number 1 of all time, with more than 120 million viewers.

The point is that sometimes a video is so important, so good, so funny, so stupid that you have to have it. For your PC, your iPod, your phone, your ebook reader, you need that video.

And YouTube won't give it to you, unless you make them cough it up. So make them.

KeepVid.com is a wonderful old friend. Paste a YouTube URL - or location of some other video sites, but more on that soon. Tell KeepVid what format you'd like, and pretty soon here comes the video to your PC.

Or phone, say. Because it is on the Internet, it works for every kind of connection.

And the bonus of KeepVid is that it can bypass a lot of state censorship, since you don't have to go to YouTube and see the video; you only need the URL.

YouTube Downloader still seems the best program to put on your Windows computer to get videos from YouTube and many other services.

In February of last year, when it was new, I wrote it was "a winner."

This simple freeware application works pretty well, given how basic the interface is. It has two main features: to download Flv files from YouTube, and to convert them to most major formats.

If there's a YouTube URL in your clipboard, it will automatically paste it for you when you click on the dialogue box. From there, just hit OK and the downloading will commence. One more left-click is all it takes to load the file in the converter, which supports iPhone, iPod, PSP, cell phone, AVI, MP3, WMV, and Xvid. Surprisingly, there's also a basic video editor for cropping videos by time stamp. You can also cut out the sound when converting. Get it at (youtubedownload.altervista.org).

Tube Hunter Ultra, however, is a whole different level of excellence.

With versions for Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox, this program plucks videos from virtually any web site, the "impossible" ones that go to great lengths to prevent downloading included.

Yes, this includes naughty sites. These days, more than ever, it's up to those of us of a responsible age and gender to keep our boys out of trouble.

After you download and install the version of Tube Hunter you like, getting a video is pretty simple. Run the program. Then go to the web page which has the video you want, and play it. Tube Hunter will pop up to confirm you want this video (click Cancel otherwise). You get a chance to rename it, then click Download.

If Tube Hunter fails to detect the video the first time, just reload the page (F5, usually) and start the video again.

That's about it. From there, Tube Hunter does the work. It tracks back the web site, and figures out how to get the video. Once it starts, you can even cancel the video play and close the web page - Tube Hunter is not capturing the video as it plays, but directly downloading it. You can continue to add videos you want to Tube Hunter, which queues them and downloads them one by one.

The first time you start Tube Hunter, you set preferences such as whether to convert the videos to another format. When it does this, it deletes the original. You can change the format settings and the download folder at any time.

Tube Hunter can be found at (http://www.neoretix.com).

Email: wandasloan@gmail.com