I recently came across a new website/service called Dirpy. They are currently in the beta testing phase, but in my experiences with the product it has performed excellently. Dirpy utilizes the YouTube API in order to transcode the video to MP3 in real-time upon a request. What does this mean for you? It means with just a few clicks and just a few seconds (depending on your internet connection) you can download an MP3 of your favorite video. Additionally, if you want to be able to take the video to go with just one more click you can download the video as well. It supports HD videos if the video is available. I haven’t tried it yet, but I assume if you download the HD version mp4 file you’ll be able to load it up on your iPad if you want to take it to go. *The non-HD files will not work with iPod, iPad, iPhone as they are Flash files which aren’t supported by Apple. Here are a couple of quick how to’s with Dirpy.
How to create an MP3 from a YouTube Video with Dirpy:
1) Go to www.dirpy.com
2a) Enter in the URL of the YouTube Video
For the demo I’m going to use a video of my wife Erin during her grad school program she took an acting class and this is her final exam.
2b) Search for the YouTube Video
It’s a nice feature that if you don’t know the URL of the video that you want you can just search as if you were on YouTube itself.
3)Modify File Information
Notice that there are a couple of elements that you can modify on this page. First is the Filename. I like to keep all of my files with the same naming convention, so I normally modify this. By default this is filled with the title of the video, but you can quickly change this to your liking. Second is the transcoder settings. They start out giving you the ability to set start and end times. By default its the entire video, but if you just need a sound byte you can edit this to just be that segment. The bitrate can be modified, but unless file size is very important to you I’d suggest leaving this at the default (high – 128 kb/s). The ID3 tags is the info that displays on your MP3 player or searchable in programs like iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc… I like a clean media library so I personally add as much info to this as I know, but it is all optional.
4) Click Download
Once you’ve clicked download your browser will start downloading the MP3 file. Next to the download button you will see an estimate of file size. Finish it off by launching the MP3 with your favorite media player or toss it on your mobile device and enjoy.
How to Download a Video From YouTube with Dirpy:
This process is almost identical to downloading an MP3 from YouTube using Dirpy
1) Go to www.dirpy.com
2a) Enter in the URL of the YouTube Video
2b) Search for the YouTube Video
It’s a nice feature that if you don’t know the URL of the video that you want you can just search as if you were on YouTube itself.
Notice that there are a couple of elements that you can modify on this page, but really only one effect the video, the Filename. By default this is filled with the title of the video, but you can quickly change this to your liking. The bitrate and ID3 tags are for the MP3 and don’t change the video file.
4) Choose Video Quality to Download
Here you get the choice of quality, 240p in a Flash FLV file or 360p in a MP4 file. IF the original was not uploaded as a HD video you will get an error trying to download the higher quality file.
The video download seems to be much clunkier than the MP3 and shows a few places for UI (User Interface) improvement. It would be nice to see the MP3 download button and video download links turned into three separate buttons labled “Download Mp3″ “Download 240p Video” and “Download 360p Video” respectively. It would also be nice if the options that only effect the MP3 be organized in a section title “MP3 File Options” so not to confuse users not familiar with what works with the video and what works with the audio.
Overall, I’m a big fan of this service. I’ve already ran into a spot where I came across an amazing cover song that isn’t available anywhere and downloaded the file and tossed it on my iPod to listen to in the car. I do have some concerns about what people can do with this. The quality is lossless, but if an artist has a good quality upload of a song this makes it way too easy to download that song. I could see a lot of hubbub (did I really just use that word…oh well) if this service takes off and gains popularity. It would be nice to give content owners the ability to choose if something like this can be done on their videos; however the realist in me knows there are always going to people and ways to illegally get content off sites like YouTube. *There is a way that content developers can already block sites like this. If the video has embedding turned off and must be viewed on YouTube, you won’t be able to use Dirpy to get the files.
All around I’m quite impressed by Dirpy and the use of the YouTube API. I like how the related videos is incorporate right into the Dirpy website. You can find yourself wondering through videos just as if you were on YouTube’s website. I’ll be starting a YouTube Channel with a bunch of the videos from the site. Once it’s setup feel free to head over to www.Dirpy.com and get copies for you’re own offline use.
