Downloading YouTube Videos

Last week my son asked if I could come and speak in his careers class. I wanted to include some videos and so I scoured the Internet looking for MPEGs that I could embed into a PowerPoint presentation. With the ubiquity of Flash and YouTube, there don't seem to be MPEG videos on the Internet any more. At least not the types of videos I was looking for.

Eventually I got tired of searching as I knew exactly where to get them: on YouTube. So I changed my search criteria to find out how to download them from YouTube.

Unfortunately you can't believe everything you read on the Internet. There were a lot of false starts that were just plain wrong. Eventually I was able to discover an "Add On" for Mozilla that allows you to save the Flash video file (with the .FLV extension). Once I had that downloaded, I discovered that PowerPoint doesn't understand them. I needed to convert the FLV file into an MPEG. I used the ffmpeg utility on Linux, but even that wasn't straight forward. I had to calculate bit rates and figure out the screen size. Luckily screen sizes are fairly standard and Adobe has a bit rate calculator. Once I figured that all out, I created the MPEGs from the FLVs and embedded them in my presentation.

This morning I delivered my presentation and it went very well. It took a lot longer to create my presentation than anticipated, but the kids loved the videos.