Here’s how you can download a video from YouTube. It surprises me that so many people don’t know you can download videos from YouTube onto your hard drive, watch them on your iPod, etc. YouTube has just about every music video ever made.

Step one is to go to the YouTube page where the video is displayed. If you see a page on some random website with a YouTube video on it, you need to go to the YouTube page that shows that video. This can usually be accomplished by clicking on the video itself. Not on the big “Play” button (sideways triangle) in the middle, and not in the little buttons (Play, Pause, etc) or the slider along the bottom, but anywhere on the rest of the video. If the video is playing, clicking right on the image will do it.

So if someone embeds a YouTube video on their blog, you usually need to click on the video (not on the buttons along the bottom, and not on the “Play” button in the middle of the video, but anywhere else, on the video itself) in order to go to the YOUTUBE page that shows that video. Once you’re on the page that shows the video on the site that the video is hosted by (YouTube), on your browser’s address bar, you see a URL (address).

MelodyCan YouTubeRipper is a plug-in for Internet Explorer. MelodyCan supports MP4 and AVI as output formats for video conversion. You can select a desired output format and video size in MelodyCan settings by choosing a suitable encoder for video files. Just click on “Rip YouTube File” button on your Internet Explorer toolbar and the selected video will be saved to your PC in a desired format. The video will download to your hard drive! (To whatever folder you specified). That could take a couple minutes.

What if you want to add this video to your iTunes library, play it on your iPod, or play it on your PSP? You then need to convert it to Mpeg4 format. To do this, I highly recommend MelodyCan Ultra Video version, a great program that converts video so that it plays on the PSP (but the video files it outputs will also play on iPods and other devices). MelodyCan has pretty good instructions, and plenty of information online. It will convert any videos into Mpeg 4 or AVI easily .