If you have not been to YouTube yet you should check it out. This is a place where users can submit any kind of videos and share them with everyone else. You can find all sorts of videos everything from SNL clips to Ask A Ninja podcasts. Anyways on to the tutorial. There are a couple different ways to do this. If you are using firefox you can download greasemonkey and get a greasemonkey script that puts a “save as” link on the top of the page.

If you have no idea what firefox or greasemonkey is,(Firefox = w00t) that is cool to. When you find a video on youtube you like scroll down to the Video URL (Permalink) and there will be a box to the right with the link that you need. Ex: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcDNXaOda3U” Once you have this you can go to this site javimoya.com which give you a place to insert a couple different links from different sites such as Google, iflims, grinvi, and of course YouTube. Now you have to paste your youtube link into the youtube box. Then click download from youtube and it will put a Video Download link at the top of the page. Right Mouse Click -> Save Link As… -> THIS IS IMPORTANT Change the file extension from .php to .flv you may also change the video name, to keep things organized. Here is a Demo from the authors site showing how to use it. From here there are many different ways to convert your .flv file to whatever format you want.
****UPDATE***** VideoDownloaderv2.0 has become availible. note this is a firefox extention, so you will have to download firefox. This extention allows you to download youtube, ifilm, google, and many other video sites videos.

For instructions on converting it to .avi or .mpg check this out: Riva flv encoder.

If you want your video in ipod format and you are on a windows pc try this: CinemaForge. This program is easy to use, although it is shareware it has no restrictions. Here is a Demo of how to us it.

Once your video is in an mpeg format you can use Videora, where the tutorial is listed here: How to convert TV or Movies to your iPod.

There is another program you can use called iTinySoft Total Video Converter which is easier because it can do all of this in one step but it has a nice little advertisement on all of your videos you convert.

If you are currently using a mac you can try this: ffmpegX utility.
Thanks javimoya