Exceptional Internet

If you’ve read part one of this article on downloading video from web pages you should have at least one video sat on your hard drive in the fairly useless .flv format. Of course what you’d really like to do with it is copy it to your video ipod or your psp wouldn’t you? The only problem is ipods won’t play flv so you need to find a way to convert it to mp4 format.

Only problem is if you do what most of us would and try googling for video conversion tools you’ll find that most of them cost money, but this being exceptional internet we wanted to find a way to do it for free. And you can. Easily.

All you need is to grab the free Videora iPod Converter and a few minutes to spare and your downloaded flv videos will be converted and it even put’s them into your iTunes library for you!

To use it simply install the application and launch it (duh!) then press convert - video file and if you don’t get the Select Mode window up click “Convert New File” towards the bottom right of the screen.

Select Normal Mode and then select your file in the bottom pane and click next in the top pane. Select your output folder (I have a seperate folder for converted ipod videos) and press Next again.

Give your video a name - this is what it will be called in your ipod library. Click “Next” again and you will be presented with a few options to set the quality. Because it will most likely be played on a small screen chances are quality won’t be too muc of an issue, but then neither is disk space these days so I tend to set video and audio quality to “Best” and Enhance video to “On”.

Hit next one more time and a “Start Converting” button will appear. Press it and wait. It can take a little while depending on the length of your video so use the time to make a cup of tea or head off to a top video site and download the next vid that you’ll want to convert.

After a few minutes iTunes should pop up on the “Movies” page with your newly converted video sitting proudly in the library ready to be dragged to your ipod.

This of course is just the basics, once you’ve converted a couple manually you can investigate the settings of Videora and find that you can have it automatically queue and convert the flv files in your download folder and then shut itself down when it’s finished. How’s that for a polite app?

Filed under: Software