If you needed to convert a YouTube video to, say, 3gp format for your mobile phone a few months back, you would probably have to use several applications ran with impossible to remember options. First, you would have to get the video in .flv format using youtube-dl and convert it to avi, mp4, 3gp and so on with a huge command like ffmpeg -i a1Y73sPHKxw.flv -ab 48 -ar 32010 -b 700 -s 320×240 -vcodec xvid -acodec mp3 video.avi (don’t use it). But fortunately, times change, things evolve and new awesome applications hit the Linux streets (not all the time but still..).
PyTube is one of the impressive applications designed to make our lives a lot easier, even if it’s just a video downloader and converter application. It’s able to do all the steps you were required to take by yourself a few months ago, but only with a few clicks. It can download video files from YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe or MyspaceTV and easily convert them to popular formats such as avi, mpg, 3gp, mp4, ogm, avm, mp3, ogg, wav or even gif within seconds with only two or three clicks.
Installation
Unfortunately, PyTube isn’t available from the main Ubuntu repositories so we have manually force its way in there:
- Open Synaptic (System / Administration), go to Settings / Repositories, open the second tab “Third-Party Software” , press the “Add” button and enter the following line;
deb http://www.bashterritory.com/pytube/releases /
- Close the popup dialogs and press the Update button in Synaptic.
- Finally, search for pytube and install it. Don’t worry about dependencies, as always, they are automatically resolved.
Usage
- To run PyTube, either click its icon in Applications / Sound & Video or open the Run Application dialog (ALT+F2), type pytube and press enter.
- Download Videos allows you to build a list of YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe or MyspaceTV and convert them on-the-fly to one of the supported formats.
- Search allows you to search for YouTube videos and add them to the convert list, on the fly, without opening a browser.
- Encode Videos enables you to convert any local multimedia files.
- Multimedia Tools provides several tools to insert audio into videos, merge videos, rotate videos, generate ringtones for cellphones, resize videos and construct a (play)list.
This one is definitely a keeper! Enjoy!