[dogscoff]

Personally I gave up trying to convert between file formats- I let someone else do the work=-) I'm building up a collection of music videos, with mpeg (and derivatives: asf, wmv etc) as the preferred format. In my experience, you'll usually find that if something is available as a qt then someone else will have made it available as an mpeg. It's just a matter of finding that someone using google and/ or irc.

My favouritest favourite toy is a wonderfully well-written bit of freeware called ASFrecorder. It takes all those pesky asx and wmx streams and dumps them onto your hard drive where they can be viewed at leisure. Nice compression too; I have some full videos (albeit in crappy quality) that take up less than a meg.

There are various other tools out there, most of which I have tried and found to be too flaky to use properly. I think there was even one which claimed it could convert any video format to an mpeg, simply by building a video out of screen grabs. Ingenious. Mad as a snake's socks, but ingenious. I haven't tried it because I wasn't prepared to pay for it.

I suppose if you were really clever, you could run some video capture software on your PC, and then feed it the video-out of another PC (or a Mac) running the QT. It sounds like more trouble than it's worth though...

BTW, with that whole piracy thread going on right now I'd just like to point out that I only ever download videos of songs I already have in CD or VHS format...