How many do you recognise?

The Free Youtube Utility combines several different modules to search, download, convert and manage Youtube videos in one interface. The software program is compatible with all latest versions of Microsoft Windows including the soon to be released Windows 7.

The Youtube search works independtly from installed web browsers. It will process the first five Youtube results pages by default. This setting can be changed to a maximum of ten processed results pages.

Videos are then displayed with their title, description, playing time, view count, url and date they have been added. A double-click on individual videos will send them to the download manager of the Youtube software program. Multiple videos can be send to the download manager together.

The download manager will start Youtube video downloads immediately. Already downloaded videos can be played in the interface or send over to the video converter to convert them into a different video format.

The file manager will list all downloaded Youtube videos giving the user the opportunity to play them at any time from within the interface.

Videos that have been downloaded can be converted into 16 different output formats including iPod, PSP, 3GP, iPhone, DVD, AVI, VCD or Mp3.

There is no option to change the quality settings of the video conversion. It is however possible to automatically convert videos that have been downloaded into a selected video format.

The Free Youtube Utility integrates itself in the Internet Explorer web browser offering one-click downloads of Youtube videos from within the browser.

The software program works pretty well and combines all the tools needed to work with Youtube videos.

[ Download Free Youtube Utility ]

Many Internet users like to download videos from Google’s Youtube video portal. Download Youtube Videos was a popular article about a week ago and YouDown would have made it if it would have been released back then. YouDown is a software program for the Windows operating system that can be used to download videos that are hosted at Youtube.

The program is a little bit less comfortable than Youtube downloaders that come with their own search or browser. Users can either copy and paste single urls into the interface of the program or import text files that contain multiple Youtube links. The import only works if the text document contains one Youtube link per line.

A click on the Go button will initiate the download right away. The videos will be downloaded one after the other until the end of the queue is reached. By default high quality defintion versions of the video are downloaded from Youtube. It is however possible to change the quality setting to high quality or low quality instead. This will speed up the downloads a lot but reduce the quality of the downloaded Youtube videos.

YouDown requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and a Windows operating system.

[ Download youDown ]

Many Youtube users do not like the fact that Youtube videos start playing as soon as the video is opened. This objection has several reasons. The most prominent ones are that users with slow connections can experience pauses during playback as the video download speed is slower than the playback speed of the video. Another reason becomes apparent if users open multiple videos at once on Youtube. All of these videos start playing as soon as the page has loaded which is obviously not a good experience.

The Greasemonkey script Youtube Auto Buffer And Auto HD and Remove Ads offers a quick and unobtrusive solution to that problem and two additional ones.

Youtube videos will automatically buffer completely without playback. Users who want to do that manually need to press the pause button on each video so that the video is not played but the contents are buffered. The script automates that process.

The Greasemonkey script adds two additional features. The first will automatically load the HD version of the opened Youtube videos. That’s a feature that most Youtube scripts and add-ons provides. The second will remove those annoying ads that are displayed at the bottom of Youtube videos.

Some users reported that they got the script working not only in the Firefox web browser but also in Opera. Interested users can download it from the Userscripts website.

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]