For a pretty long time, YouTube was the only online videos website I visited. Then, a lot of competitors started to become popular, and so I started to slowly betray YouTube. Now, I have at least a dozen of such sites I check from time to time, but the main problem remains the same - how to download Flash videos and convert them to more popular formats?
Obviously, the problem I mentioned above doesn't have any limit, since it doesn't really matter if you're using Windows, Linux, or a Mac. Anyway, today I'll leave the first two aside, because we're in the Mac realm here, so let's find a solution for those trying to convert flash to video on their Apple computers now!
Just as a side note, it doesn't really matter where you got your FLV or SWF file, so this program can also prove to be a useful tool for some webmasters. The program I have in mind is called FlashVideo Converter, "a powerful and versatile program for converting any flash video file to one of many popular video formats including iPhone/iPod mp4, Mobile .3gp and MPEG2" coming from MacVide.
A handy compliment to iLife Suite, FlashVideo Converter supports a wide range of video formats for saving your flash movies, including MP4 (iPod Video), MOV, 3GP, MPEG.
While the feature list looks pretty well, I think that $99.95 is a bit too much for a video converter. Anyway, here's the list of essential features:
* Encode Flash to Video to MOV format
* Encode Flash to Video to MP4 iPod format
* Encode Flash to Video to 3GP (3GPP, 3G2) format
* mp4 iPod support for converter SWF and FLV files
* Support Flash 6, Flash 7, Flash MX, Flash 8, Flash 9 compressed movie
* Convert Movie Clips and ActionScript and ActionScript2
* Movie Width and Height determination
* Customizable dimensions for exported video
* Auto Determination of Movie length
* User can control Movie over Capturing
If you think you really need this program, and you have at least Mac OS X 10.4 and 20MB of free hard drive space, you can go ahead and grab it right off its official page.
