Video sites like YouTube and Google Video are great sources of materials for your presentations. But what do you do if you don’t have an Internet connection in the conference room or lecture hall in which you’re presenting? Better safe than sorry–save the video clip to your hard drive so you’re ready to share it, connection or no.

There are several video formats these days, all jockeying for position to be the dominant player in this growing market. Flash video is used by most video sharing sites due to the near-ubiquity of Flash Player. However, Flash video is primarily designed for a web browser and does not lend itself to offline viewing (such as being embedded in a PowerPoint stack). Luckily, converting video from one format to another is increasingly easy these days. TubeTV, a free conversion tool, might be the easiest way to accomplish this. TubeTV can’t grab video from every site–for example, TV-on-demand from Hulu, ABC, and other networks won’t work–but most sites that offer video sharing options work great.

TubeTV requires a Mac with OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard). It also requires QuickTime 7.2 or higher (free and probably already on your Mac) and Perian, a free video conversion utility used behind the scenes. If you don’t already have Perian you’ll be prompted to download and install it the first time you start TubeTV.

Download TubeTV to get started, and move it into your Mac’s Applications folder. Open TubeTV–it kind of looks like a web browser because, in part, it is.

Let’s check TubeTV’s preferences to make sure video gets converted to an appropriate format. Open the Preferences window (open the TubeTV menu, then select Preferences) and click Downloading.

For most presentation purposes, iPod format is probably suitable. If you want video to be saved in the highest quality possible choose Apple TV–however, keep in mind that many online video sources aren’t saved in a quality this high, and there’s no way to improve quality once it’s been reduced.

While we’re here, note where your converted files are destined. In my case they’re saving to my Downloads folder, but if you want to change that to a different folder (say, your Desktop) you may change that now.

Close the Preferences window to return to TubeTV’s main page. We’re now ready to grab and convert a clip.

Using your web browser, (I’m using Safari), find a web page with the video clip you want to save. Here’s a good one to start with. Pause the video if it’s already started playing, then go back to TubeTV.

Click the Grab button (shown above; a glove) to load the same web page in TubeTV. Now, click the Download button (black, downward-pointing arrow) to begin the download and conversion process.

Depending on the length of the clip and the speed of your Mac, conversion will take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. When it’s finished, check the destination folder you specified earlier to find your new file:

This is a standard MPEG-4 video file, which you should be able to embed directly in a slide or play with a standalone media player like QuickTime or iTunes (I personally prefer using a standalone player so I can easily adjust the video to display at full screen).

What about Windows?

TubeTV is a Mac-only product. However, I’ve read good things about a similar program called Ares Tube, designed for Windows, and VConvert, a Web-based conversion application. If you’ve tried either of these, let us know about your experience with a comment below.

Tags: macintosh, presenting, video