The video-sharing YouTube is a web phenomenon.

It’s at the forefront of the trend for ‘user-generated content’ in which ordinary people upload their own video content onto the internet, rather than just accepting the material that is fed by traditional television and film companies.

There are vast amounts of video material on YouTube, ranging from silly home clips to serious projects from budding film-makers and musicians. There are also quite a lot of film clips and music videos as well.

However, it can take a while to locate and view individual clips from YouTube, and there’s no obvious way to save favourites to your hard disk. But it is possible to download video material from YouTube directly to your PC and create your own library of video clips that you can load up and watch whenever you want.

In the Workshops section of Computeractive issue 241 we show you how to do just that, with help from Apple QuickTime. So, refer to the magazine and then click to transfer to the QuickTime download page on at Apple's website. As well, you'll need a program called Free YouTube To iPod Video Converter, so click to transfer to the Free YouTube To iPod Video Converter download page at the software developer's website.