We have all, at one point or another, wanted to download a YouTube ^[1] video for various reasons (watching it on the go on your PMP comes to mind). However, considering that this is a streamed Flash Video (FLV) that is embedded onto the site, it is not possible to download the video simply with a right-click and a Save Asoption. This is where Media Converter ^[2] (formerly known as Media Pirate) comes into play.

Unlike the other ways to download the FLV files that are found online, Media Converter is completely different in that it offers a high degree of customization of the format of the video file you are converting and downloading. You can choose between 3GP, 3G2, ASF, AVI, FLV, M4V, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG, OGG, RM and WMV (now that is a long list!) for video. If you wish to rip only the audio from the file, you can do that as well the options in that respect are MP3, OGG, WAV and WMA formats.

^[3]You can also set advanced options such as video and audio bitrate, the codecs used for audio and video (which is another long list!), the offset and duration of the video as well as the resolution. This freedom of tweaking is what makes people flock to Media Converter whenever they want to download and convert a YouTube video on the fly. Since the converter also supports FLV files from any site, you can download MetaCafe, DailyMotion, Facebook and more for free users and also queue the conversions just like a normal video converter.

However, there are restrictions imposed by this online converter software. For unregistered users, the limit of downloading and converting videos is up to five per day and they cannot download files greater than 100MB. For paid users, this limit is raised to 1GB and an unlimited amount of videos can be downloaded per day. The charges are $4 per week or if you buy in bulk, $150 per year.