The other day my mum came to me asking if she could keep a video from YouTube.  Having not ever needed to do this so far I set off to discover the best tool for downloading a YouTube video and converting it to a decent file format.

After some Googling and a search on LifeHacker I stumbled upon the recommended and widely used YouTube Downloader.  However after installing and downloading my selected YouTube video I was disappointed to discover the latter half of the video had not downloaded correctly.  This was disappointing as otherwise this seamed a tidy little app (note: I have not fully tested this app so it may work for you with no problems).

After trying various websites promising to download and convert my YouTube video choice with no avail I became sceptical that any web based tool would do the job properly.  Happily I found a site which did the job, quickly and with no problems at all, the interestingly named – Bender Converter (after the Futurama character).

In summary - as you can see it successfully completed the download and conversion of the 10 min video to MPG format, without asking for any email addresses!  Bender Converter a success so I thought I would share it with all of you to save you time if you need to do the same.