As time moves on, so do standards. Where Real Media once ruled, the king is now Flash Video (.flv). In this post, I'll be looking at a couple of freeware and shareware utilities that'll make capturing and converting Flash Video a doddle!

In the past, the medium of choice for sending music and video across the web were the proprietary formats developed by Real Networks. For nearly as long, the software of choice for capturing them has been RM Downloader. With the rise of Youtube and Google Video, Real has taken a big drop in popularity. Some might say this has to do with some unlucky publicity. Others say that it has something to do with the fact that for the majority of users on low bandwidth connections, this was what you were most likely to see...

Flash Video has become almost a web standard, supporting a mix of high quality and low bandwidth. It is, however, a bugger to capture! One of my favourite tools at present is the Moyea FLV Downloader. This handy little app runs in the background, and can capture FLV files to disk silently and automatically.

Once you've got the files, you'll want to convert them to a universally understood format... The Pazera Free FLV to AVI Converter does exactly what it says on the tin. It'll also convert to PAL and NTSC encoded MPEG, which is nice as well...

My final recommendation is shareware... Not WinZip "I'll pay later" shareware, but actual try before you buy software... If you produce a lot of Flash Video, 123 Flash Compressor could shave a huge amount off of your bandwidth bill. The baseline claims are a little excessive, but you can easily see file size reductions of 30% or more without a noticeable loss in quality.

Hopefully, this should give you an idea of what's available - of course, more specialist products are available, but from an occasional downloaders perspective, this should give you something to play with...

NOTE: DON'T DOWNLOAD MATERIAL YOU'RE NOT ENTITLED TO! IT'S VERY NAUGHTY! IF YOU USE THIS INFORMATION TO DOWNLOAD STUFF OFF OF YOUTUBE, YOU ARE WORSE THAN HITLER AND OSAMA BIN LADEN COMBINED...