Do you Tooble? Okay, so maybe it’s not a verb yet (as in, “I’m going to go Google that”), but who knows… maybe someday it will be!
What is Tooble? Tooble is an application for Mac OSX that makes it really easy to put YouTube videos on your iPhone, iPod or Apple TV.
With Tooble, you can not only browse, search and download anything YouTube has to offer, but Tooble will actually help you get those videos onto the aforementioned iPhone, iPod or Apple TV. Or, if you don’t have any of those devices (or if your iPod doesn’t play video), then you can use Tooble to download them onto your computer.
Using Tooble is super easy in my experience. Load it up, and you’ll see a screen that looks like an iTunes or Apple email style program. Just a left sidebar and a wide open space on the right, along with the search bar. Since you opened Tooble looking for something in particular, simply type in what you want into the search bar, and Tooble spits out your results.
From here, you simply check the little check box beside that video. If you have more than one video you want to download, click ’em all! When you’re ready to download, simply hit the download button in the lower right of the screen, and Tooble immediately goes about downloading them.
But that’s not all. When it’s done downloading your YouTube videos, Tooble will begin converting them to MP4 format. It’s this format that is necessary for playback on iPods, iPhones and Apple TV sets. When it’s finished converting, Tooble adds them to your iTunes library. This way, the next time you synchronize your iPod or iPhone, the videos can be added, and you can watch them on the go.
But there’s even more.
Unlike a couple other YouTube downloader/converter applications I’ve looked at, Tooble also offers the ability to browse YouTube. You can’t browse it like you would the website, but if you check out the sidebar, you’ll see a few preset “categories” of YouTube videos. There is the list of featured videos, popular videos, recently added videos, top favorites, most discussed, highest rated, and videos you have marked as your favorites. Having this browser here, frankly, is just as good as going to the actual YouTube website. You get all the content, easy organization, and a really nice interface without a lot of distractions.
I’m kind of picky, I’ve realized, when it comes to these type of programs. As much as I like having a single application do one thing, it needs to do it well before I’ll use it. As many of the other YouTube downloaders/converters as I’ve downloaded, none of them has kept a spot on my hard drive. This can be because they don’t convert videos, they don’t allow browsing, their search results are limited… it’s a lot of things.
At the moment, about the only thing I have to complain about with Tooble is that the only output format it offers is MP4. While that’s awesome for iPod, iPhone and Apple TV users, and also works with iTunes, there’s something to be said for being able to convert those videos to something else. I have a standalone DVD player that lets me burn Divx files to it, and watch them on my television. With other programs, I could have converted the YouTube files to Divx, but not with Tooble.
So, at the moment this is probably another program soon to hit my Trash can. That isn’t to say it isn’t good, because it really is. But without those extra conversion offerings, I may as well use something else to download, since I’ll need to use a different program to convert anyway. Still, if you want a program to search YouTube, download and convert your videos for iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, then Tooble really is a nice program.
