YouTube On the Go

Development, Gentoo, Palm April 15th, 2007

Everybody loves YouTube, the hub of short video clips uploaded by the users. It makes more sense to watch YouTube clips than King Kong in the Metro. To watch one small clip, you need to:

  1. Install VideoDownloader Firefox Extension
  2. Download the video clips to the harddisk
  3. Manually convert the .flv to .avi using ffmpeg like this ffmpeg -i foo.flv foo.avi
  4. Copy to the Treo 650’s extension card

That is quite tedious. I need a tool to automate the above procedures, here come the tubefetch.txt:

$ ./tubefetch.py –help
TubeFetch: Download the video clips from YouTube
Version 0.1.0. developed by Kun Xi <kunxi@kunxi.org>
Usage: tubefetch.py [options] files …
                       
Examples:
  tubefetch.py -c http://the-url http://the-url2 …

Options:
  -h –help          print this information
  -v –version       version information
  -c                 convert the flv file to avi, needs ffmpeg

This script would download the flv files and convert them to avi file automatically, then copy the files to Treo 650 using CardReader, CardExport.

A better solution may go further:

  • Develop a Firefox addon: one-click would download/convert the file to the specified path
  • Develop a KPilot conduit, download the AVI files to Treo 650’s extension card when HotSync

Well, if I persist the enthusiasm for 3 months, I might roll up the sleeves and go through all the way to do so.

Update The DownloadHelper plugin is exactly what I am looking for. The author does not address the CJK file name issue, here is the modified version to bypass that problem.

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