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Direct via Cultcase.com are the Top 10 Online Video Conversion Services. I’ve personally used Vixy (just this week in fact) and find online conversion services to be awesome. They’re probably slower than using a thick client, but the convenience of not having to install additional software to convert video, or grab flash from the web to store locally is just awesome.

Most online video platforms such as Youtube, MySpace and Metacafe use Flash video streaming (.flv) rather than simple links to files we can download. There are various reasons for that with the main one being the common business model most of those services relay on: advertising. In other words - we get to watch the content for free but we need to do that online and on the site. While this may be serving well the interests of the service provider it might not always be how we want things to go: some of us want to archive our own copies of the videos we love. Others may want to transfer a certain movie from one website to another. Well, this is the time to let you know that you don’t have to be “on Youtube” to watch a Youtube movie. Instead, you can download the video stream to your computer, keep it there as a “normal” video file and watch it whenever you like. Nothing is illegal or fishy about it, it is simply another way of consuming the data. Just like you do when you save an html page to your computer and read it later.

So, for your convenience, CultCase has selected some of the best online video conversion services available today. They are all free of charge and do not even require registration. They tested all of them by converting and downloading the same 1:42 min Youtube video. There were no significant differences between the services in terms of both time-to-deliver and video quality. All of the files looked reasonable considering the quality of the source and took approximately 1-2 minutes to delivery. Read the rest of this entry »