Since broadband became widespread and YouTube fever took hold of the computing community, we've all watched a lot of online video. And while streaming media's all well and good, if you see a particularly corking clip it's not like you can right-click and save it to your hard disk. Sure, you can bookmark it, but what if it gets taken down?

The solution is to use one of the applications out there that allow you to save Flash files from web sites, and MyTube Internet Recorder (MTIR) is one such effort. However, it goes considerably further than the average program when it comes to features above and beyond merely copying your favourite footage from the Internet.

The installation process is straightforward, and although the program requires .NET version 3.0 to function, it downloads this automatically during setup. It also brings up a link to grab the latest version of Flash player to ensure this is fully up to date for recording purposes. All this worked fine and we were up and running in a matter of about ten minutes.

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MTIR uses three core processes; search, download and convert. The search section scours eight video portals for whatever terms you specify. The portals covered include YouTube and Google Video, along with the likes of MyVideo and Daily Motion. There are no search parameters available aside from limiting the number of results returned, but this doesn't matter too much as whatever topic we threw at it, the program pulled up an interesting and relevant selection of movies.

The results can be watched in a video preview window and any clips you like can be tagged for download. This is step two of the process, which simply consists of clicking the download button and waiting for MTIR to pull the clips off the relevant web sites. If you've found a movie outside of the program in your browser, there's a facility to paste in the link here and download it.

Finally, the program's convert tab allows for batch conversion of videos from Flash format to WMV, DivX or a number of others. It's possible to enlarge the pixel size of the video and MTIR employs scaling filters which help to smooth over this transition. They do a good job, too, although don't expect miracles when blowing up low quality source material. The program also has pre-set output resolutions to match common portable players (for example the iPhone or Nintendo DS).

There aren't many disappointments here and the only serious issue we came across was that the video preview player didn't seem to want to work half the time on the convert screen, although it functioned just fine on the search tab.

MyTube Internet Recorder is a neat solution for recording Flash video. It's possible to use freeware solutions to perform this task, but MTIR also offers a built-in search engine, batch conversion options and pre-set video formats for many portable media players (not to mention scaling filters for upsizing resolution). The only problem we had with the program was the somewhat flaky nature of the video preview player.