Video reapers and casual enthusiasts alike might be dizzied by the sheer number of file formats, portable devices and products for both a price and free in the world of digital media. In order to successfully manipulate a movie you have to find the right converter to change it into the format required by your device. Even if you’re just working with small clips, you need the right tools to rip, encode and convert those files into workable pieces. The following are seven of the best resources available for video reapers.

YouTube Downloader

YouTube Downloader is one of the most popular YouTube applications. With this software you can download videos from YouTube in addition to Facebook, Yahoo Video, Google Video and more in order to convert them into other formats. You can also use it to convert any downloaded video for playing on your iPhone, iPod, iPad, XviD and MP3 players.

BS.Player

BS.Player claims to be the best and most popular multimedia player in the world. Not only is it a free product, but it’s available in excess of 90 languages. It requires very little of your CPU power so it can be run on even the weakest of devices. One of the nice features about this player is that it can read video from the Internet (from YouTube for example) and save it on your computer. It can read just about any kind of media format out there including subtitled files.

VLC Media Player (All Platforms/Open Source)

This powerful tool is a media player but it does so much more. VLC can rip DVDs and play any ripped discs even when in ISO format. It also plays FLV files directly from YouTube with no conversion to an AVI file necessary.

VidDownloader (Web App)

VidDownloader is a web-based application that is great for people who don’t want to mess with downloading software. This application will take streaming video and convert it into a playable format. Unlike other similar products, this one produces an ubiquitous AVI file.

Any Video Converter

This freeware product is Windows dependent, but it can convert pretty much any video including Xvid, MPEG, DVD, WMV and many more into MPEG-4 format for replaying on an iPod or your PSP and many other portable devices. It can batch process, leaving the original file untouched.

iSquint

iSquint will convert video files to iPod and iPad readable files and save the result directly into your iTunes library. This is a free product, but the upgrade called VisualHub is available for a $23.00 licensing fee and is well regarded as a great investment for serious video reapers.

AVI2DVD

AVI2DVD is a windows-based freeware program that will take any video file and make it burnable to a DVD. It can also create DVD menu options including chapter, subtitle and audio buttons.

These are just a few of the great products that are available to help you manage and manipulate your video files. As quickly as new devices come out that only support proprietary files and readers, so too will developers create workaround programs such as those listed above to help you enjoy media on your terms.