You can easily download videos from YouTube and Google and use them in your PowerPoints. You can go to other video sites too, although the millions of videos available on YouTube should be enough to enliven your presentations.

These two programs are inexpensive and easy to use:

PC: Use Quivic for $14.99. Free trial download.

Mac: Use Tubesock for $15. (They now have a version for the PC too but I haven't tried it.)

After downloading you can edit the videos on any video editing program - even on Windows Movie Maker or iMovie which come for free.

These are the simple instructions - read on for more advanced conversions to iPods and other displays...

For more advanced work in adapting your videos to PowerPoint for presentations or to iPods, or for making movies for that matter, you'll need a few more programs. But beware - there are so many codecs out there that it can get confusing at times. There are other variables you should learn too such as frames per second and screen ratios to name a couple.

Most Valuable: When you get into this a bit, you will find you'll want to put videos into different displays. The best video converter is AVS Video Converter for $39 and also free trial. Very user friendly and I've found this will convert just about any video format to any other - audio as well.

High end editing programs are Adobe Premiere Pro for PC and Final Cut Pro for the Mac. They both are expensive and there are other mid-range editing software solutions unless you are serious about your filmmaking. And if you just want to shorten YouTube videos, you only need the free software that comes with your computer.

Other items you might look into are VEOH for more videos, and Replay A/V for capturing streaming video (although not user friendly) and then a program just for converting streaming video is the Moyea suites for $24.