How to save online videos (Youtube, etc.) and even convert them; save them offline, into PowerPoint for a presentation.

It’s nice to use multimedia, where our learners can see and hear fantastic videos. With limited budgets we can produce only so much in comparison to the wealth already out there. But how do we get what's available in to our class room?

During power point presentations videos can be embedded into our slides. The best way to do this is have them downloaded to your disk, then imported into power point through the usual insert menu system. This allows us to have the additional benefit of freeing the media from streaming during high traffic times, which often causes video stutter and delay. I’ve encountered this during class; it critical that videos be reliable for the class leader as well as the students.

The hard part of this then, is how, in the first place does one get those great youtube videos and flash files downloaded off the bandwidth-weary Internet and onto a trusty local drive in the first place? Here are a few resources to do just that:

http://www.downloadhelper.net has the easy solution -- push-button download and automatic conversion.

1.) Firefox can download the video from Video DownloadHelper, a button extension that is a must-have. It will even download the HD versions.

2.) Next there’s an auto-convert extension, working in the background for you, all in a very reasonable file size. There is a fee to remove the icon. But it all is very automatic, so it can easily be worth the price.

http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free This is less automatic, but has no cost. Additionally, this free video converter can batch-convert a large group of files, into many formats. Just follow step one above, but substitute step 2 with the any-video-converter.

http://vixy.net Online, no install, web-service converts a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) for you into DIVX and other formats like MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP), such as for your phone and PSP, then lets you download.
It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and with less loss than a typical transcoder. When you submit a URL, it will download and convert to the video format, and then you can download the converted file. Not a problem if you have DIVX installed, because the Video portion is encoded in DIVX format, you won’t see anything in your media player. So that causes some work and may be a challenge during the play of the file.

http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash.html I haven’t tried this product, but I can see how useful it would be. It will help distribute slideshows with transitions and animations, with very small file sizes. I’d love to find a free version of something similar.

Remember to distribute the videos according to net rules of information property. I try to include a bibliography or a clickable link in the PowerPoint to reference to the video’s original source.