Dirpy – A Review
3 min read
Today I am going to give a review of a pretty slick, hidden jewel of a website called Dirpy. If you are like most people who browse around the web, you eventually watch a video on YouTube. If you have an account on YouTube and like a video you add it to your favorites and playlists so you can go back at your leisure and re-watch them over and over again. This is OK for the visual based videos, meaning America’s Funniest Home Video types of people falling down, bloopers, etc… But what about the music videos of amateurs pumping out fantastic tunes, remixes, compilations that do not exist in MP3 or some other audio format???
This is where Dirpy comes in. Dirpy allows you to convert YouTube videos to MP3s so you can play them on your audio player of choice. See where some organizations might have a problem with this? There have been Firefox extensions that allows you to do the same thing, but I have found those to be clunky and problematic. Dirpy is the first well functioning website that I have seen that allows you to do it.
Before I go any further on what Dirpy can do for you, I do not expect this website to live very long. What Dirpy provides is a work around to everything the RIAA and Movie studios hate, allowing you to enjoy content, initially released for free, anywhere you want. You will use Dirpy in manners that meet your ethical compass anyway, but I thought I’d throw that out there.
Back to it…
Dirpy is still in Beta as the main page says and in some cases it acts like it is still in Beta. At the time of writing this post the search functionality wasn’t working. It’s running on Apache… What the search does, when it’s working, is display results of YouTube videos that you are looking for and allows you to convert them all from the website. To get around the internal search, you can cut and past YouTube links into Dirpy directly.
I also found that not all videos work and not get loaded in Dirpy properly. But it seems to be an individual video level problem, so if one link doesn’t work go find another copy of the same video and load that one. Small annoyance, but I can live with it.
I will use a fan made South Park video currently on YouTube as an example for this review.
The link to the video directly is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qST5eVLudrQ
Dirpy is very simple to use and gives you a lot of control on what you can do. This review is short but Dirpy is that easy to use.
Goto Dirpy and put that URL into the search box and hit the Dirpy! button. It will then load the video and take you to the Dirpy Studio page. From here you have full control on what you want to save.
- Name the file (default is the YouTube video name)
- Edit the ID3 tags in the MP3 about to be created
- You can save the whole video or a snippet of time within the video
- Save it in as low or as high of quality as you want
- In addition to saving the MP3, you can download the video in .FLV (Flash) or MP4 video format for playing on an offiline video player, such as an iPod/iPhone/iPad.
- In the upper right have of the picture, you can see it has social sharing so you can tell your friends on what you are downloading.
You hit the download button and it will save the MP3 file locally to your computer.
That’s it, very simple, easy to use interface. As you can see for what Dirpy can do I don’t expect it to live very long before it’s pressured with ‘Evil Letters’ to shutdown or be sued. But until that time, Dirpy is a great service to get your favorite YouTube videos in an offline format.
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The items in this post are purely the thoughts and opinions of the author. All facts and data are gathered across various sources and the author’s conclusions are based that information.
– Techie Pro
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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