ListenToYouTube.com: About Us
ListenToYouTube.com is the result of about a month of research and coding, started as a
personal challenge. It was a bunch of fun to work on, and the result is a simple, but
effective online YouTube video to mp3 converter.
The way the site works is this: Once a user enters the YouTube URL, the software retrieves the
FLV file (flash video) from YouTube, saving it to our server. We approximate the time needed
to transfer the file, and give the user a countdown, as well as showing them a thumbnail image of
the video, also retrieved from YouTube.
Then, the YouTube video file is parsed one byte at a time by our PHP MP3 extractor class. We
add an Xing header to the MP3 file to alleviate the audio duration errors given by the iTunes
player (and a few others). Finally, we present the user with a link to download the MP3 file.
The time needed to retrieve the FLV file depends on the upload speed of the YouTube servers, but once
we have the flash video, it takes our software less than 3 seconds to extract the mp3 audio.
Questions, comments, kudos, or complaints can be sent to ducain[at]gmail.com
