Hey You. Can You YouTube On YouMac?

YouTube is a free video hosting web site that lets you upload, view and share video clips.

Some of the clips are amazingly… uh, well… different. Do you YouTube on your Mac?

YouTube lets you view their online movies in real time on your Mac, but the Flash format of the movies often made it difficult to save the video clips and play back on your Mac. Now you can.

Movies from YouTube play just fine in the Mac’s Safari as well as in Firefox and other browsers. Saving the movies and playing them again later has been the challenge.

Enter four Mac applications which extend YouTube’s movies to your desktop and your iPod and your friends.

The first is TvTube. This $15 utility lets you browse YouTube, Google Video, and Yahoo Video for movie clips.

Save them as favorites and share the list with your friends.

TvTube works with PPC and Intel Macs. View a video in the left column, keep track of all the clips in the right column. What could be easier?

Easier is PodTube, a free Mac PPC/Intel application which lets you encode a YouTube video for you iPod, and add it to your iTunes library.

PodTube’s interface is quirky but worked well for me. I prefer the listing format of TvTube, but you get what you pay for.

Free and easy is what you find with Tuboy Juego. Same thing. Download YouTube clips for your iPod and iTunes.

I had to call Mrs. Kaneshiro from her condo down the hall to help translate. You’ll see what I mean.

Not free is the $15 TubeSock. What you get is Mac simplicity at its best, except for that aging brushed aluminum design.

Just enter the YouTube video clip URL into TubeSock and it downloads the movie to your Mac.

Then you can save it in various Mac formats and select Add to iTunes.

What could be easier?

Or, download the popular and free VLC. It won’t convert YouTube video files, but it will play them.

YouTube uses a native FLV (Flash) format but TubeSock converts the file to H.264, MP4, or even an MP3 file so you can play the audio on a non-video iPod.

YouTube itself is Mac simple. There’s the most recently uploaded video clips, the Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Discussed, Most Linked.

Click on a video clip and it loads and begins to play. You can send the clip’s URL to a friend, and embed the video into your web site.

We’ve entered a new era in sharing information, but way plays on YouTube doesn’t stay on YouTube, thanks to a handful of Mac applications that let you download, convert, and store video clips on your iTunes or iPod.

What’s your favorite YouTube video clip?

I’ve got a George Bush favorite video and a Shania Twain video that is hot and sexy.

What about you? Do you YouTube on your Mac? If so, what do you use?