Vixy.net – Download Videos From YouTube Easily

Posted on Apr 13, 2009 in Multimedia, Productivity, Test Drive Apps by dee 1 Comment

Vixy.net has been around for a number of years now and has been an excellent way to download youtube videos for offline viewing (or for viewing on portable devices such as your iPods).

It has a simple user interface and in a few simple steps, the user can grab a video, convert it to a number of formats and download onto their computer.

It supports conversions to the following formats:

• AVI (Divx)
• MOV
• MP4 (for iPods and Sony PSP’s)
• 3GP (for Mobiles)

To use it, firstly you need to get the URL of your video. This is simply the web address that you see in your address bar when viewing the video on youtube. As an example, I’m using http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pXfHLUlZf4 as my video to download. Easiest way to do this is to go to youtube, to your video and select the address bar and copy it to your clipboard.

Step 1 – Open up your favourite web browser and go to http://www.vixy.net. Paste your copied URL into the URL box, and select which format you want vixy to convert the video to.

 

 

Step 2 – Hit Start when you are ready. At this point, vixy will connect to youtube and start doing the conversion on their servers. There is a progress bar that shows how far along they are as well as expected size.

 

Step 3 - When finished, the application should show you a file save dialog box. This is where you’ll actually be downloading the converted video to your computer. If a dialog box doesn’t show, there is a link in the resulting window that you can click to download the video.

 

Converting and downloading can take some time with longer videos. And I’ve found the vixy servers to be a little on the slow side.

Once the video is downloaded onto your computer, you can then view it in your favourite media player or transfer to your mobile/iPod devices for viewing on the move.

I find vixy.net to be extremely easy to use and excellent for downloading shorter videos (ie, less than 10 minutes viewing). However its not perfect. There are occasions where the video comes through but the audio doesn’t or vice versa as well as conversions failing due to load on their servers. You just may have to try again or at worst, look for a similar video. I’m not too sure on HD videos though. Someone may need to try them out and see if both audio and video comes through.

There is also now a desktop version of this application. However, it is still in Beta and while its free (currently), the application does feature advertisements. I did not install the application on my machine for this review.

Vixy.net is one of many online transcoders out there (Orbit, Ares Tube as examples) and its being continuously improved so expect the developers to put in some increased stability and performance across the board.

Tags: Cool Apps, Multimedia, Productivity, Test Drive, Test Drive Apps, Tutorials, Vixy.net

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  dee Jun 14 2011 - 4:05 pm Reply

  If you have Firefox, its better to perhaps use the following plug in to download stuff from youtube:

  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-video-downl-10137/