14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube is becoming even more popular as more and more ways of accessing the content of the site are becoming available. New devices such as the iPhone and Apple TV are bringing YouTube movies to places where they were traditionally absent. Despite the ever increasing popularity of the service, and the improvements it keeps receiving over time, there is still no easy way to save videos off of the site for viewing later, or storing and very popular devices such as the iPod have no access to it. Like in all such cases, third party applications, such as Seatubes, step in to fill the gap.
What it does Seatubes is a small application designed to make quick and easy work of downloading and converting movies from YouTube. Offering a multitude of methods to acquire the movie and a plethora of formats for conversion purposes, this application has all the power you need while still remaining small and easy to use.
Working with it Working with Seatubes can be broken down into two steps, acquiring a movie and converting it. While the program's interface may not be the prettiest or the most intuitive, it is nevertheless quite straightforward and easy to use.
There are quite a number of ways to get a video from YouTube. The simplest is to copy a movie's address and add it to the list manually. Since the application already provides the bulk of the URL, all you really need to copy is the ID of the movie itself. The next option is to drag and drop the URL from a browser onto the list, to have it added automatically. While the dock icon would have been a better choice, that doesn't work so you will have to either position the windows accordingly or switch applications while dragging in order to drop on Seatube's file list itself. Alternatively, Seatubes can look in your browser and automatically extract the URL of the site you are looking at, but this requires the video you want to download to be foremost and issues may arise when you have lots of tabs and windows all open at the same time. Last but not least, there is a little helper that you can add to your bookmarks bar in your browser and use for drag and drop purposes. Simply drag the URL onto the helper and Seatubes will automatically process the file. This is by far the best option because you don't have to leave the browser in any way.
Once the movie, or movies, you want to download have been added to the list, you can go and change the options for each and enable conversion to any other format to your liking. The list is quite extensive and contains both commonly used formats as well as more obscure ones. More importantly, Seatubes lets you export to partial formats such as AIFF and WAVE or Image sequences, so you can thus keep only the sound or video should you choose it. The settings for each format let you make all the necessary tweaks and are very thorough. Unfortunately, the conversion and download phase are inseparable to the program, so you cannot download something now and convert it later. The conversion can only take place immediately after the movie is downloaded and should you forget about it, it will have to be downloaded all over again. Downloading and conversion can be done in batches, simply by adding many movies to the list. The download progress shows the URL of each movie, the title that the program automatically extracts, the location where the file is being saved and last but not least, the progress, both as a percentage and as bytes downloaded. The conversion progress is much simpler, being nothing more than a bar, which shows the current progress. The duration of conversions depends a lot on the format you are converting to, with some being very fast and other being decidedly slow. Fortunately, all this can be done without you interaction, overnight. A very nice touch is how the application will automatically assign custom icons to downloaded movies based on the movie's 'poster frame.' While not huge in any way, it does make locating movies when using the icon view much easier.
Codecs While Seatubes will download and convert movies for you, in order to do the latter and be able to actually watch them, you will need to install the necessary QuickTime components. While this additional step may not be apparent, it is nevertheless necessary. Fortunately, the Perian pack that the documentation refers to makes all this very easy and offers support for many such third party codecs.
The Good Lots of choices for both downloading movies and converting them, in a small and simple application. Little touches such as the automatic assigning of the name and icon make it even better.
The Bad The fact that downloading and converting are joined at the hip can be a bother, but it is not a huge issue unless you happen to forget.
The Truth There are lots of such programs out there and they all get the job done. Seatubes makes it easy to batch process a large number of files with minimal hassle, doing the bulk of the work for you.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
