How to Convert & Edit YouTube Videos On Your Computer

YouTube is the biggest video sharing site on the planet. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for a review of the latest gadget, or a simple walking tour of a historical site, chances are you’d find it on YouTube.
Most videos uploaded to YouTube are made by amateurs like you and I, usually with modest video making equipment. It’s not a surprise that you’d find a lot of the videos lacking in quality and/or content.
Now, quality is something that you can’t do much about but if it is the content that is bothering you and you have the inclination and enthusiasm to make some changes, we’ll tell you how to go about it.  Maybe one particular scene in a video really bothers you and you want to take it out.   Well here’s one way to go about it.
Downloading and editing videos on YouTube typically involves three steps. Since you can’t edit the videos on YouTube online, the first step is to actually download a copy of the video locally to your computer.

Downloading YouTube videos to your computer
There are a couple of different ways that you can do this and we’ve talked about a few in the past.  So we won’t dwell too much on this part.  Googling on our search engine for “download youtube videos” will bring you plenty of options.
Which brings us to the second step in the process.
Converting FLV files to Windows Media Video Files (WMV)
There are dozens of software available all around the web that could potentially help you do this conversion, but why bother with all that searching when we have the coolest open source solution for the job, ffmpeg. If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can use ffmpeg directly or download and install the excellent WinFF utility, which is basically a graphical wrap-around for the app.
Launch WinFF and click on the add button to add the FLV file you just downloaded. Select “Microsoft” from the Convert To drop down and select the WMV2 Generic option from the Device Presets drop down. Choose a location to save the converted file to and click on convert. WinFF will launch ffmpeg which will do the conversion for you without you having to use any command line kung fu.

Editing Videos using Windows Movie Maker

Windows Movie Maker is a free software bundled with Windows which can be used to edit and enhance videos and it has built-in support to read WMV files. Mark has previously written two excellent articles on editing movies using Windows Movie Maker and those should be enough to get you started.

Use WMM to remove the offending scene(s). Use the preview window to view the results of your artistry as soon as you’re ready.
When you’re done with editing the video, click the Publish Movie button and export the movie using one of the many choices given, including burning the movie to a DVD or writing a new WMV file to the disk for playing on a computer.

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How to embed high quality YouTube videos

A lot of people don't know that YouTube has high quality videos, as well as the generally poor-quality standard versions. The links to the better (not HD, but still pretty good) versions are easy to miss, but there are a few steps you can take to make sure you're watching (and even embedding) the good stuff. Jason Kottke ran through a few of them recently on kottke.org.

First, make high-quality your default setting. You can do this in the Account menu, under "Playback Setup." That takes care of playback, but what if you want to link to the high-quality version of a video? Just paste "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=22" at the end of the URL. 18 is the 480x360 version, and 22 is the 720p version. Some videos will have one, but not the other, so try both if you need to.

When it comes to embedding, you can make a quick change to the embed code to get better video quality. Just add "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" to the end of the URLs in your embed code.

Filsh.Net Converts Web Video For Playback Anywhere

Plenty of good software exists for capturing audio or video from YouTube and other such sites, but I'm always on the look for portable apps or web services that offer the same features.

Filsh.net offers an extremely easy-to-use way to convert clips before downloading. It's so easy, in fact, that I barely noticed the German interface whilst creating a Nintendo-DS compatible version of some kid setting his pants on fire. Nice!

Drop in your target URL and select your desired format from options including AVI, MPG, MP4, DPG (the DS format), 3GP, OGG, or MP3 and Filsh goes to work. Multiple sites are supported, including YouTube, Google Video, Break, MyspaceTV, and Veoh. I was unable to grab from Vimeo, but Filsh does support uploading - so I could save a clip first and then send it back up to Filsh for conversion.

Conversions are fairly fast, and I didn't notice any quality problems. Videos remained clear, and audio extracted from clips to MP3 sounded just as good as the original.

Filsh works well, and though it doesn't handle the variety of conversions that Zamzar does it's still a useful site to keep in your bookmarks.

Unintelligencer Maeks U Rite Dum - Time Waster

It's always nice to have a good laugh during an otherwise stressful workday, and what's more fun than laughing at outright supidity?

The Unintelligencer uses an array of sophisticated linguistic algorithms to convert your text from perfectly suitable English into the unrecognizable drivel you've gotten used to seeing on YouTube, Facebook, and all your other favorite sites.

Let's try an example from a favorite movie of mine: "i haved an wonderful girlfriend linda. 2gethr wee drove too small cabin ins da mountains. t seems an archeologist hads kum tew dis remote place 2 translate + study him latess phidn: necronomiconexmortis. thee book uv de ded."

Oh, the good times you'll have with this. Send that important departmental memo as a Moron, or shoot the moon and render it Incomprehensible. Unintelligencer offers 5 subtle shades of idiocy!

It's web based, so users of any operating system can utilize this fantastic - and unbelievably useful - tool. I'd like to see a reverse translation so I can finally understand what the hell some of these lolcat people are talking about.

Add subtitles to YouTube vids with Subyo

Sometimes we find ourselves watching funny YouTube videos in a language we don't understand, and we feel like we're missing part of the joke. What did he say, and why did she drop that on his head? Maybe we'll find out now, thanks to Subyo. It's a service that lets you create your own subtitled translations of YouTube videos, and search for subtitles submitted by others (by entering a video's YouTube URL, naturally.)

The downfall of sites like these isn't the functionality -- Subyo works just fine, and we finally figured out what the rappers were saying in some of those music videos -- it's the challenge of getting widespread user adoption. The site's only as good as its users, so it will be interesting to see whether Subyo catches on and becomes an essential add-on to YouTube.