I was helping a friend put together a PowerPoint presentation for a persuasion speech she was giving this week in class when she pointed me to a YouTube video she wanted embedded in her presentation and she only wanted a small portion of it (22 seconds of 3 minute video).
First I had to get the video off YouTube... I've tried lots of Firefox extensions to download FLV from a site before so I was skeptical, but low and behold I came across
Fast Video Download when I searched for FF extensions, installed it, restarted FF and visited the site. To my surprise... it WORKED!
Then, converting FLV to something I could open and edit. Again, quick Google search yielded lots of results. My first pick was
Pazera Free FLV to AVI Converter of which I was a little nervous, but it didn't require any installation which I like. WOW... easy and it worked flawlessly. I found it would convert SWF and FLV to AVI or MPG. In fact, had lots of settings to tweak even allowing me to scale the video up from it native YouTube size to something more conducive to a PowerPoint presentation.
And, it's all FREE! I love it. Looked many times for combos of this type. This is the first time I found ones that all worked first search and was so happy with the result.