Long time no write. There have been some interesting developments in the LDS iPhone community as of late. One that I am most excited about is an app that will allow you to stream the audio on your iPhone or iTouch, even over 3G!

A brother in the church developed an app called ooTunes. It actually streams A TON of radio stations, but one of them will be Conference. Check out the website, or subscribe to this blog that he created just for this project. The app does cost $4, but I am always for supporting brothers in the gospel that are working to make LDS resources available, and I hope you will be as well.

One awesome thing he is doing though, is offering the app for free for the first 40 people (is there even that many of you out there?) that write a comment on his blog or send him an email. It only works for 4 weeks… but hey… that get’s you through conference! Check out this post for more info.

If you would like to support him, but just can’t swing it right now, there is a free alternative to try out called FStream that should work as well.

I have noticed over the past couple of months that I am getting a lot of traffic on this site from searches for “LDS Spiritual Thoughts” and related searches, even though that is only a small portion of what I write about.

With that in mind, my sweet wife and I have created another website dedicated soley to LDS Spiritual Thoughts. I won’t be posting any more spiritual thoughts on this site, but focus on technology and it’s use in the gospel. Go check it out!

LDSSpiritualThoughts.com - "Spiritual Thoughts to Brighten your Day"

I often will find an awesome YouTube video that I want to share in a class I am teaching…. but how do I get it downloaded? Unless you are one of the lucky few, you don’t have an internet connection at church. I hope this post will give you some ideas of things that have worked for me.

NOTE: YouTube has said that they are working toward putting download options on all Video’s, but for now they are only on certain popular ones. So hopefully one day, this won’t be important.

Downloading YouTube Videos:

The easiest way to download a YouTube video is the following:

• Go to this website: http://keepvid.com/
• Enter the URL in the top part: ie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM3mlgLAlMs
• Click the Download button to the right. Look to the bottom and click the download button under High Quality. Wahla!

You can play the video it downloads with Quicktime, which if it doesn’t play on your computer, you can download for free here.

Downloading other Online Streaming Video’s

Sometime you run across video’s from other sites you want to download. There is a nice Firefox Extension you can install that will look for the media on each page and allow you to download it. It is called SoThink Web Video Downloader for Firefox.

For those that might not be familiar with Firefox, it is a web browser like Internet Explorer or Safari and can be downloaded for free here.

After it is installed, you will see a little icon in the top right next to the google bar. Browse to the video you want to download and then click on the icon. It will have a URL in there of the video download. Right click on that and select Download.

The download will be in .flv flash format. You can watch that using Quicktime or VLC Media Player.

Conclusion

This is just two of dozens of ways to get videos offline. You should keep in mind that this is an area that is constantly changing. Google may change the way Video’s are online tomorrow and it might stop working. Sometimes it just will download the sound, and no video. It isn’t an exact science, and unless there is a Download option right next to the Video, there will probably always be the possiblity of problems. That being said, it does work mostly!

Feel free to share other ideas and tools you have used in the comments. Once you have it local, you can then put it on a DVD if you have software for that, or just bring a laptop to class to show the video. Good luck and happy teaching!!