TubeTV - 0.9

Got an Apple TV, video iPod, or iPhone and want more content for it? Wish you could watch YouTube on your TV or iPod? Like to keep copies of your favorite internet videos on your Mac?

TubeTV is a new freeware program for Mac OS X Tiger and above which enables you to search for, save, and convert Google Video and YouTube videos to a format suitable for playback on your favorite devices.

A built in search bar and web browser helps you conveniently locate your favorite videos, or, if you prefer, jump to the current URL of your default web browser with the jump button, or paste one in directly. High quality video conversions using the H.264 codec are performed with QuickTime®. Double clicking on a converted video file will open it in iTunes allowing easy library addition and syncing to your desired device. Note that TubeTV does not interact with iTunes directly - it's the same as importing any other video file to iTunes. Alternately, just drag a saved video file on to QuickTime Player to view it locally.

Yes, it's true that Apple has added YouTube support to the AppleTV (June 20th), and iPhone, but TubeTV can still be helpful for saving your favorite videos and adding them permanently to your library. It's also still a great solution for viewing content on your video iPod, phone, or locally on your Mac.

What else is it good for? Older computers tend to be too slow to play YouTube videos at full speed - they stutter and skip frames. Use TubeTV to download the movie and then play back the flv file with QuickTime player at full speed rather than suffering through the stutter - this works even on an eight year old Mac like a G4 400 MHz tower (from 1999!).

This software doesn't require an installer; just copy it to your Applications folder and launch.

Note: a preference sets whether or not the downloaded flv movie is converted to H.264 automatically after downloading. If conversion is enabled, you will end up with two movie files on your desktop (or wherever you choose to save them) unless you have the option checked to auto-delete the original. The file ending in .m4v is the one you should open with iTunes and sync to your iPod or Apple TV. For use with the iPhone, choose the "iPod" setting since some users have reported that the AppleTV formatted videos don't sync with iPhone.