Downloads for Managing Your Media

If you're a multimedia fan, you probably have a hard disk full of videos and songs. Keeping track of them all, playing them all and managing them all can be tough. To help, we've assembled a selection of downloads that can do all that for you and more. With these 10 free and low-cost utilities, you can download videos from YouTube, download streaming audio and even edit your own creations.

The Web is full of great videos, from YouTube and countless other sites. The problem is, the videos stream to your PC, so in order to watch your favorites, you have to head back to the particular sites that host them. Wouldn't it be nice if you could download the videos to your hard drive, so that you could view them whenever you want and send them to friends?

We've chosen two great video downloaders -- one is a Firefox add-on and the other is a stand-alone program that works specifically with YouTube. In addition, we found a very good tool for converting videos into assorted formats so that you can view them on any device. And all three programs are free.

Just about any device these days -- an iPod or another MP3 player, a cell phone, a PlayStation Portable -- can play video. But what do you do when you have videos on your PC that you want to play on those devices? PC formats won't necessarily play on the devices; and even when they do, their dimensions are often wrong.

Any Video Converter Free comes to the rescue. It converts video files into many different formats, so you can make downloaded videos playable on various portable devices. It even will download YouTube videos for you.

Converting videos is exceptionally easy: You just select a video or videos, choose the desired format and click the Encode button. That's it -- the video is then ready for transfer and playback.

Download Any Video Converter Free Version | Price: Free

With this free Firefox add-on, not only can you download and save videos from popular Web sites, but you can also convert video files from one format to another. The conversion function is particularly important because downloaded videos from YouTube (and often from other sites) are in the .flv format, which few media apps will play. To convert videos, you'll have to download another program called ConvertHelper, but DownloadHelper has details on how to do that. When you see a video online that you want to save to your local disk, simply press a hot key, and Video DownloadHelper does the rest.

Download Video DownloadHelper | Price: Free