Save, Convert and join Youtube movies for playback on your Blackberry

lets say you see 4 movie clips on you tube that you want to join together to form 1 movie and save it to and play it on your Blackberry.
to start first download the mencoder tool. It should be available in your distributions repository.
type apt-get install mencoder if you have a debian derivative distro or
type yum install mencoder if you have a red hat one.

When you watch a movie clip on you tube the .flv file is automatically saved into your /tmp folder so once you have watched a clip that you want, you can simply copy it from your /tmp folder and save it somewhere safe, youtube saves its files with a name that starts with Flash followed by some arbitrary characters like FlashFgna. Copy these files to another folder so that they do not get deleted as your system will delete all files in your /tmp folder when you log out. so for my example watch the four movies you want on you tube, each one in a different tab of your browser once you have watched all 4 movies, open up a terminal window
type cd ~ then type mkdir videos which will create the directory were we are going to be working in.
cd videos to cd into the folder
type copy /tmp/Flash* .
will copy the four .flv files to your /home/username/videos/ folder don't worry if you don't see the .flv extension they are .flv files Linux doesn't care for extensions.

Sometimes you can skip the following step and you can try and join and convert your Flash files from .flv to .mp4. using the mencoder tool. but I have been much more successfull first encoding the files to the .avi format and then if i want to put the file on my Blackberry i will encode from .avi to .mp4


to encode from Flash to .avi we need to create the tool that will convert flv to avi files, here is a script that can do this.

Copy the following lines into your clipboard by highlighting them directly from this post and hitting cntl- "c"

#!/bin/sh

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 {-divx|-xvid} list_of_flv_files"
exit 1
fi

# video encoding bit rate
V_BITRATE=1000

while [ "$1" ]; do
case "$1" in
-divx)
MENC_OPTS="-ovc lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=$V_BITRATE:mbd=2:v4mv:autoaspect"
;;
-xvid)
MENC_OPTS="-ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=$V_BITRATE:autoaspect"
;;
*)
if file "$1" | grep -q "Macromedia Flash Video"; then
mencoder "$1" $MENC_OPTS -vf pp=lb -oac mp3lame \
-lameopts fast:preset=standard -o \
"`basename $1 .flv`.avi"
else
echo "$1 is not Flash Video. Skipping"
fi
;;
esac
shift
done


type vi /usr/local/bin/flv2avi.sh
(/usr/local/bin is a good place to save scripts as it is part of your path environment which means you will be able to execute your script from anywhere on your system)

this will open up your vi editor
once open type "i" to go into insert mode
then click on edit paste to paste the code into your script.

type :wq to save your script and exit out of vi

type chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/flv2avi.sh to make your script executable

to convert all the .flv files to avi we can do them all in one command. Type flv2avi.sh -divx Flashfile1 Flashfile2 Flashfile3 Flashfile4

were file1 file2 file3 file4 are the .flv files you want to convert.
once done you will have 4 additional files in your /home/username/videos folder all with .avi extensions.

now to join these files together and convert them to one .mp4 file which is the format that works best on your blackberry we also do it all in one command
mencoder file1.avi file2.avi file3.avi file4.avi -o newfilename.mp4 -ovc lavc -oac lavc
this will join all 4 files into one file and convert it to a .mp4 file
next just copy the file onto your blackberry and you will be able to play it using your blackberry's media player.