I was recently asked for an easy method to save a video seen on YouTube to the person’s Mac. I found TubeSock, that can grab YouTube videos from the web and copy them to your video iPod, Mac, or PlayStation Portable by just copying & paste the YouTube URL and click “Save.” TubeSock knows how to convert the FLV flash video that YouTube uses with the codec and bitrates best for each device. It will even add the video to iTunes for you.

TubeSock converts YouTube’s native FLV file format into H.264, MP4, or MP3 files automatically using the correct file format, bitrate, and naming convention for the selected target device. TubeSock can install a bookmark script for your favorite web browser. When you browse to a YouTube video you like, simply click the bookmark button. The video instantly appear in TubeSock and will be ready to save to your your Mac’s Movies folder, so that they can be played full-screen with FrontRow or put in iTunes to sync to your iPod.

TubeSock costs $15. Until you register, TubeSock will convert only the first 30 seconds of a video.

Another possible solution I have not personally tried is:
PodTube can capture any YouTube video for an iPod. It grabs the frontmost YouTube video opened in Safari, encodes it for the iPod, and adds it to the iTunes library. PodTube is available for Mac OS X. (It does require setting the download folder to the Desktop.)

    | Tags: iPod, Video, youtube