How to Download and Convert Videos using My Video Downloader HD

This tutorial will walk you through the process of downloading and converting high definition videos from YouTube. The same process works for downloading from other sites and converting to other formats.

If you would like to follow along please be sure that you have downloaded and installed My Video Downloader HD

This tutorial will be very detailed as I tend to over describe the process, really the longest part of this process is finding the videos you want. After you do it once, you will be downloading and converting videos without much thought. We intentionally made this software as easy as possible, yet still give advanced settings to users who like more control over there conversion process.

Find a video to download

The first step would be to find a video that you would like to download. For this tutorial I have searched YouTube and found an "Avatar" movie trailer that is available in HD formats.

The permanent URL address for this video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ

NOTE: A permanent URL address is the URL that the video will have for as long as it is hosted on YouTube. They have other URLs that can be created such as if you are watching "related videos" or "playlist videos". To find the permanent URL under each video there is a "Share" section, click on this. You will now see a section titled "Copy and paste this link into an email or instant message:" and it will have the URL below.

Downloading the Video

Copy the URL of the video you would like to download. I have copied the URL from above (Avatar Trailer).

Now paste the URL into My Video Downloader HD Step One - Get Video from the Web

Naming the Video

My Video Downloader HD will find the video and pull the Name of the file from YouTube. You can edit this name if you would like. Sometimes I do not like the name that was used on YouTube but I still like the video. This steps helps me change this to a convention I like. As you can see in this video it pulls the title "Avatar Trailer The Movie (New Extended HD Trailer)

I really do not like how this is worded or formatted, so I am going to change it to "Avatar Extended HD Trailer".  NOTE: Special Characters such as ()&^% in the name will trigger a error message, remove these for best result.

Choosing the Format to Convert to

Click the drop down menu under "Choose the video format to encode to:", then choose the format you would like to encode to. In this case I chose HD-MKV, which is a popular format for High Definition videos. The video is a MKV file and will require a special codec to play on your computer or media player. This site has a pretty good pack of codecs available in one easy package that is easy to install, (although I really dislike the "Communist" type of graphics).

After you have chosen your format click on the advanced button. You will now get this window that allows you to adjust the settings of the conversion (advanced users love this feature!)

You can choose your preferred settings from each list. In this case we have two options for video resolution 1280x720 and 1920x1080. As you can guess the first is for 720p resolution and the second is for 1080p. I recommend that you convert to the same resolution and the video you are downloading from. For example if the video you are downloading is in 720p you will want to convert to 720. You can change it to 1080, but it will not look any better than 720 and you will be wasting hard drive space as the file will be much larger.

So how do you know what resolution of video you are downloading? Look at the video on YouTube and in the bottom right hand corner you can choose the resolution of the video you are watching. See screen shot below.

So in this case we see that the best version of the video is 720p, so we should choose 1280x720 as our video resolution in the advanced screen.

NOTE: My Video Downloader HD will ALWAYS download the highest quality video from YouTube, so if there is a 1080 version of the video and you are watching it in standard definition, it will download the 1080. The better file we have to begin with the better our converted videos will look.

Other settings available in the advanced screen are video frame rate, bitrate, audio codec, audio bitrate and audio channel. I will not go into all of these settings in this tutorial. Look for a tutorial in the future just on these settings.

Downloading and Conversion Queue - The final step

After you have chosen the format and the settings, click the "Add to Queue" button. By default settings your video will begin downloading immediately.

NOTE: In the "Setting" and "Queue" section you can change so that files do not begin downloading until you hit the start button.

In the Queue there are five sections

• Video -  Name of the video and a logo of the site it is downloading from
• Size - Size of the video file being downloaded
• Progress - The progress of the download AND the progress of the conversion
• Time - The time remaining for the progress
• Speed - The speed at which the video is downloading

When completed you will see this window

Check the box to open the folder where the converted file is saved.

Now you can watch your video whenever you want, internet connection or not.

This was a bit of a long tutorial and you made it through. Now you should be a pro at downloading and converting high definition videos from YouTube!