I am sure, everybody knows what YouTube is. For those, who have heard the name for the first time, YouTube is a popular video hosting and sharing service, letting users view and upload video files. There are many competing video hosting sites, growing fast in term of amount and popularity. YouTube uses Adobe Flash to play back videos. This is a standard format supported by most browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. It still has limited abilities to be played on the standard video players on the computer, on mobile devices, and portable video players, like iPOD. Uploading videos to the site is quite easy. You can upload most popular video formats: WMV, AVI, MOV, and MPG files. YouTube automatically converts these files to Flash as they're uploaded. However, downloading and converting the files in the more usable formats, like AVI, is more complicated. YouTube does not allow users to download videos easily. There are third party tools that allow doing so, but they are not encouraged or supported by YouTube. The downloading may even violate YouTube's user agreement .

But, if you are confident that your downloading do not violate YouTube’s (or, the matter of fact, other video hosting sites) user agreement, you have a huge choice of the paid and free computer programs that can do the job easily and fast. In this publication, I will not review the related software, just refer to the publication, presenting one of the freeware programs Easy Video Downloader ( http://freeware4review.blogspot.com/2008/01/download-and-convert-video-from-youtube.html )

My intention today is present a different way to deal with the program, which might be helpful in many user cases. I am talking about free online converting and downloading services, that will bring the online streaming media in FLV format to device of your choice. In fact, in most cases, it is as simple as drag and drop. You copy the address of the web page showing the video you want into online form, and video is downloaded from the Web to your PC and converted for playback on the device you have selected - PC (AVI), MAC (MOV), iPOD/PSP (MP4), mobile (3GP), and audio only (MP3). To my surprise, there are already many competing Web Sites, appealing to the visitors to apply for their services. For your convenience, I have compiled the Web Rating List of 15 free online converters from FLV on RateItAll with brief description, rating, and access links.

Access the list:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24833-free-online-flv-downloaders-and-converters.aspx

Feel free to leave your own feedback on the presented services and vote for your favorites.

Enjoy the release!