Say you watch a YouTube video and you love the audio for so much that you absolutely have to have it. It could be a spoken-word bit that you really want to take with you on your music player, or an artist posts music to YouTube for free with a static image over top of their songs; either way, it’s difficult to find an app that can download just the audio from a YouTube video in high quality. Enter Dirpy, a free Web app that can transcode a YouTube video into high-quality MP3 in real time.

Dirpy was designed to give you more control over the end product when you transcode a YouTube video. The service is simple to use: Just paste in the URL of the YouTube video you’d like to download the audio from, and the service will show you the video so you know it’s the right one. It allows you to choose the beginning and end of the transcoding session, too. For example, if you’re watching a 20-minute comedy routine but only the middle 3 minutes made you laugh, you can tell Dirpy to capture only that audio.

In addition to being able to specify start and end times for the recording, you can also choose the bit rate at which Dirpy encodes the resulting mp3. The service defaults to the highest available bit rate, but allows you to downgrade if you want a smaller file. Dirpy is capable of encoding at up to 256 kbps, although most YouTube videos default to 128 kpbs. Dirpy also allows you to add ID3 tags to and MP3, instead of just spitting out a file that you aren’t able to edit.

Dirpy also displays related videos, so you can easily move between similar songs or videos without having to go back to YouTube. You can also add Dirpy to your bookmarks toolbar to transcode any YouTUbe video with a single click, and the site’s FAQ has detailed instructions on how to do this in just about every browser.

Dirpy is in beta, requires Javascript to run, and works in every operating system. The developers say the Web app works best in Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera. It’s completely free, and doesn’t even have ads.

[Visit Dirpy]

What if you want to rip audio from YouTube videos? Or want to covert any FLV file to AVI,MOV,MP4 or MP3 format?

With the Online FLV Converter at Vixy, you can convert YouTube videos in other formats like AVI, MOV and MP4 or convert the video as an audio only file in the MP3 format. Vixy also lets you covert any FLV file to AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3 format online.

When you submit an URL, this service will download and convert the video to your desired format and lets you download the converted file. Vixy allows you to download online videos direct to PC, iPod and PSP for free.

The above trick can also be applied to other video sharing web sites like Google Video and MetaCafe.

If the YouTube Video is on your hard disk as an FLV file, you can use the free FLV Extract utility to extract audio and video from FLV files. The video is saved as AVI and the audio is saved as MP3.

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Video-enabled visors seem to be all the rage these days and you’ll love the Vuzix iWear AV920 3D headset. This visor can connect to most video devices that have provisions for AV-out, and provide a virtual display that’s equivalent to a 62-inch screen viewed from 9 feet.

If you’re an iPod user this gizmo will work on Gen 5 iPods. The Vuzix iWear AV920 is being offered to customers in the UK and can be used with mobiles that have AV-out facilities like the Nokia N95, iPods, portable DVD players gaming consoles, and the like. It also has built-in earphones.

In the US it’s priced at $349.95.

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Free media file converter FormatFactory is a handy all-in-one utility for taking one kind of audio, video, or picture file and converting it to another. The interface is a dead-simple drag-and-drop affair, and it’s meant for running batches of files through converters-FLVs to Windows Media, MPEGs to iPod-friendly video, DVDs to DivX files, etc. You won’t get a lot of options for quality control, compression rate, or other tweaks, but for some folks, that’s really a benefit. FormatFactory is a free download for Windows systems only.

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