Many folks these days download videos from sharing sites such as YouTube (usually with this handy Firefox add-on). The downloaded video is usually MP4 or FLV, both of which can be played with the VLC player. If you want to burn this video to DVD however, chances are the software you use to do that doesn’t recognize either format, so you’ll need to...

FFMPEG is a command line utility that just about anyone who has used video in Linux is familiar with. It will convert FLV files to AVI, MOV, M4V (iPod), RockBox, etc. and do so easily. However most people hate command line stuff, and I don’t blame you. Most GUI-based FLV converter apps are absolutely terrible, save for one: WinFF. Don’t be fooled by...

You’ve probably heard of web sites like KeepVid where you can direct-download the FLV file of any YouTube video you watch by entering its video URL. You don’t have to do this. You can use Firefox’s local file cache to do it also. Yes, it takes a little longer, but the plus is you don’t have to rely on another site just to download videos....

I discovered this on a goof. On my laptop I had installed the latest version of WinAMP to listen to MP3s and so on and it had associated itself with FLV extensions (I just did a standard install that auto-associates instead of a custom which it why it happened). I downloaded a few FLVs as backups from my YouTube channel and double-clicked one to view it –...