YouTube+Ideas

Preserving YouTube Videos
YouTube has a treasury trove of great material for teachers and students. But two potential pitfalls exist: The Internet has a way of being down just at the moment that you need the video (or your workshop room doesn't have the promised connection!) and videos can be removed from the site (which happened to me last week).

To prevent those problems, you want to extract the video from YouTube and save it to your computer, not just embed the code. Two easy ways follow:

1. Use a video download program to pull the video from YouTube and then use an FLV Player to show the video. I use a program called [|Tubesucker]. You can download the basic version for free and the site has a tutorial. That will put the video on your computer, forever. However, YouTube videos are in FLV format, which computers can't play without special software. So you also need to download the free [|FLV Player].  Once you have these on your computer, you pull the video off YouTube, save it on your hard drive or flash drive, and then drag/drop it into the player anytime you want to watch/show it. The advantage of this procedure is that it takes only a few minutes to download the video. It's a safe download. The disadvantage is that you have to install new software and must have that software to run a video.

2. Use a converter program such as Zamzar to send you a format that will save and play on your computer. This [|program] will allow you to copy/paste the URL of the YouTube video onto its site. You then tell the site to convert the video into a format that your computer knows, such as mpg or wmv (Windows Movie). Zamzar will email you a link to the converted video so you can download the video. The advantages are that you don't have to install new software and you get the video in a format that any computer can use. The disadvantage is that it can take several hours to get the converted video and you only have 24 hours to pull it from the Zamzar site. A lot of popups appear during the use of Zamzar so be forewarned.

Not Using YouTube? Need to convert a video? @http://keepvid.com/ http://download.cnet.com/Any- Video-Converter/3000-2194_4- 10661456.html TubeTV