ImageSometimes many of us have problems with the Flash player. It just doesn't work. TinyOgg is the solution for this problem specially if you are using Firefox, Chrome, or Opera.

TinyOgg is a service designed to get rid of Flash-based videos by converting them to the free Ogg format. It is not the only service to accomplish this, but it exists to replace some existing services that are built upon non-free, non-published source code.


Technical Details :
TinyOgg service is built entirely on top of several  Free Software projects including:

  • Python, the programming language in which TinyOgg was written.
  • Django, an excellent framework that makes developing web applications (such as this one) so much easier.
  • FFmpeg and ffmpeg2theora, the former is a powerful program that converts videos to Theora and Vorbis; the later is an excellent, easy-to-use interface to the former.
  • URip and WatchVideo, two programs used to download and convert YouTube videos locally, they inspired the idea for creating this service in the first place.
  • Free CSS Templates, a website that provides free (as in cost and as in speech) templates. I use their "Fruits" template.


By this time, TinyOgg supports YouTube. It will support many video-sharing websites in the near future. It is designed in a way that supports adding new websites easily.
TinyOgg is released under Affero GNU General Public License and you can get it from this page.

Here some screen shots about  TinyOgg service:

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The main page

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More Options

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The final step

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Download and convert YouTube videos

Valdis (not verified) on Sun, 01/17/2010 - 17:13

Hi guys,
You can use Bender YouTube Converter - to download YouTube Videos as MP3, AVI, 3GP and many others for free. It very nice service!

Command line rules!

Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 07:35

You can do this from the command line in linux. You might need to install from your software respository: youtube-dl, ffmpeg, and oggenc.

youtube-dl -o my_file_name.flv http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx

ffmpeg -i my_file_name.flv my_file_name.ogg

If you only want the audio without the video, here is one of many possible ways:
ffmpeg -i my_file_name.flv my_file_name.flac
oggenc my_file_name.flac

Also, these commands have several additional options for special cases (e.g. skip a specific number of seconds, etc.). Read the man pages for more information.