TubiTunes: From YouTube to iTunes

YouTube is a great place to watch videos. There are tons of users, and tons of videos. Unfortunately, you can only access it online. For some of us, this can be a major nuisance, because you can only watch your favorite YouTube videos while near an internet connection. With Many Tricks‘ TubiTunes, you can have your favorite videos right inside iTunes.

The easiest way to sum up TubiTunes is it’s a download manager for movies from sites like YouTube and DailyMotion. It has an interface just like one of Many Tricks‘ other apps, Leech. It really acts like a download manager in that you can click on the TubiTunes bookmark (in your bookmarks bar), and TubiTunes will start to download the video. Not only does it download the video, but it also converts into virtually any format that QuickTime can handle. There are presets for an iPod, an iPhone and an AppleTV.

As I talked about above, with the click of a button, TubiTunes will download and then convert a video. To enable this feature, all you have to do is go to TubiTunes – Integrate with Browser. It will open up your default web browser, and give you a link to put in your bookmarks bar for this 1-click downloading. Then, whenever you are watching a video that you want to download, you just click on the bookmark for TubiTunes! Now it doesn’t support every site that has video content, but it does support the big ones. It would be nice to see Hulu support, but of course, there are legal issues that prevent that from happening.

Once you have started a download, TubiTunes pretty much goes on autopilot. That is, unless you havn’t selected a preset to use for conversion. To do this, go to the Processing tab of the Preferences. Now you just choose an item from the “Convert for use with:” popup. I personally use the “Ask Me” item, because it gives you a ton of options for bitrate, format, and other things I like to control; however, if you just want to download your videos for one of the devices on the list, just use the presets. The three presets that it comes with are very sufficient for most of us, but it would be nice to see a few more built in presets. Either way, you can always choose your own options by selecting “Ask Me.”

So far, all I have talked about is converting video from the web, but TubiTunes also has another major feature. It can convert video files from your computer. You just drag it onto the main window or the Dock icon, and it will start converting. Depending on the preset you have chosen, TubiTunes may also ask you what settings you want it to convert with. So not only is TubiTunes a video download manager, it is also a video converter.

One issue I have with both Leech and TubiTunes is the lack of a feature to auto resize the main window to fit the number of downloads/conversions. This may just be my OCD, but I always like when apps have that feature. I also wish that there were limits on the size of the main window. For some people (like me), we like to know that the size of our window has been optimized for the application.

TubiTunes, by Many Tricks retails for ⚬4.95 (~$8), and you can download a free trial from their website. You can get TubiTunes for free if you decide to buy their video manager, yFlicks. It is a nice and simple interface, which makes it so simple to download movies. It is worth the money for the saving of time alone.

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