Being creative with YouTube

Leave all moral hangups at the door. This post will be about illegal activity!

How do you download music? Well for full albums/collections I'm sure you torrent; but what about for individual songs? There's always the option of googling for it. That's pretty decent, but it's very hit or miss. You could listen to it on YouTube, everything is there! Problem is, you have be online to do that and keep hitting the play button over and over. That won't do.

I'm going to tell you how to turn a YouTube video into an MP3.

Step 1: Did you know you can download any video from youtube by putting the three letters "pwn" in front of youtube.com? Who doesn't love the LazyTown/LilJohn mashup "Cooking by the Book"? Terrorists, that's who. Are you a terrorist? Then go watch it right now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQp5l4-sfFA Pretty good, huh? Good enough to download? Just put "pwn" in front of the word youtube in the link: http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=hQp5l4-sfFA This will direct you to a site where you can download the FLV file. Success! Almost...

Step 2: Now you have an FLV file, which can be played on Winamp or Windows Media Player, but that's not good enough! What if you want to be able to put it on a CD and listen to it in the car? Enter stage left: FLVExtract. It's a small open source program you don't even have to install to run. Just download it, unzip it, and run FLVExtract.exe. This will open a window where you can drag and drop an FLV file and get an MP3 back. (Take note to uncheck "Video" and "Timecodes" in the options). FLVExtract will place the MP3 in the same location that the FLV file was.

Step 3: Enjoy! Relax as you listen to John Mayer's Vultures or party hard with Andrew WK. Or even better, enjoy this rendition of Amie by user resilience1031 or Colin Hay on Scrubs. This is the kind of stuff you can't find anywhere else but YouTube!

Now you can avoid the viruses from file sharing programs like LimeWire and the long start times of bittorrent! Have fun!