Wired Cola

Recently, I was asked to do a video conversion which involved taking a YouTube video and turning it into a DVD (surprisingly, this was entirely legal). As an aid to my memory, and possibly a help for you, I have written out the toolchain I used.

This is not trivial, and there's several ways things can fail. I make no apologies for that, or for the fact that I don't know a darned thing about the tools on the PC side. That said, the tools described below are almost entirely cross-platform (probably even Linux-usable, though I imagine Real Linux Users just emit a command-line from memory that goes "wget something something | ffmpeg yadda yadda | mkisofs blah blah blah | growisofs whatever")

1) Get the video from YouTube.
Since you're doing it anyways, here's the first trick, which is to follow these complicated directions to download the high-quality version of the video:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html

This will (usually) result in you getting a copy of the video in MPEG-4 (.mp4) format on your computer. Yay! On some videos, it might be in Flash Video (.flv) format. Boo!

2) Get the video into your DVD authoring utility.
Many DVD authoring tools will happily deal with MP4 video. Some will not. Few will deal with .flv video. If either is the case, you can use the free video player/converter VLC to fix things.

Download the VLC Media Player, and you can use it to save your video in a different format, whatever your DVD program can deal with. MPEG-2 or .AVI are probably the best choices; the former, because it is the actual format DVDs use, and may limit transcoding, and the latter is just what most PC-side DVD systems are likely to expect. On the Mac side, I think MPEG-4, MPEG-2, and .DV would all have merits. The last one would be big, but high-quality. I don't know if it would be better than just going straight to MPEG-2, and if you get the high-quality version from YouTube, I'd just leave it like that.

3) Burn the DVD

Most computers with a DVD burner already come with DVD authoring ("burning") software. You do have a DVD-burner, right? If you do, the best bet is to use the DVD authoring software that comes with the computer. If not, try DVD Flick on the PC side.

Mac users will almost certainly be in iDVD for this part, though I'm such a grumpy sort that its decent capabilities never satisfy me ("no second-audio-track options? No captioning? You call this consumer-friendly!?"). There are other programs out there; I have not used them. On the other hand, I haven't used DVD Flick, either; it seems to be very simple, but it also seems to work.

And that's it, no step 4. Hope that gets you out of a bind.