Here’s another mobile web site that lets you download videos from YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion and MetaCafe to your phone. It’s called MyMobileClips and works a little differently than TinyTube which I reviewed a week ago.

To use the mobile service you have to register at the MyMobileClips.com PC site. Don’t be put off by the fact that you seem to be registering for a phpBB Forum. There is a forum but that’s not the main purpose of the site. I think MyMobileClips leveraged the robust registration and email verification facilities in phpBB to get the site up quickly. That’s in keeping with the rest of MyMobileClips which has the look of a quick, clever and very functional hack.

Once you are registered you can download any YouTube, Google, DailyMotion or Metacafe Video either to your PC for sideloading or directly to your phone at wap.mymobileclips.com. Unlike TinyTube, access to videos on MyMobileClips isn’t immediate. You request the video and MyMobileClips retrieves it and converts it to mobile format. This process takes about 5 minutes. Your converted videos remain available for you to download for 24 hours.

The PC interface is barebones, you just paste in the url of the video from YouTube or one of the other video sites and enter an arbitrary password. MyMobileClips gives you a short pin number. You can retrieve your downloaded video later by entering the password and pin.

Unlike the mobile versions of most PC sites, the MyMobileClips wap site is more full featured than it’s big brother. Instead of entering a video’s url – which would be very tedious on a phone – you can browse YouTube and MetaCafe videos or you can search YouTube, MetaCafe or Google videos. Searches return descriptions and optionally thumbnails. Speaking of options, you can specify all sorts of parameters such as video size (128×96 or 176×144), frames/per second, bitrate, mono or stereo sound, and 3gp (h263) or mp4 encoding.

I won’t say that the MetaCafe mobile UI is slick or particularly easy to use. Pages are long – there’s a lot more scrolling than I like. If you want to view the thumbnails you have to click a link after the page has already loaded forcing a time wasting reload. But no other mobile video site has the power and flexibility of MyMobileClips or makes the entire library of YouTube plus three other Major video sharing sites available on your phone, PDA or portable media player. If the UI gets to be too much, a link near the top of the mobile home page lets you download videos that you had queued in advance on the PC site.

MyMobileClips is linked from Yeswap.com portal under Entertainment/MobileVideo.

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Ratings: Content: Usability: