Features

There are three main ways to copy video from a mobile phone to a PC. The simplest is if your phone has a removable flash memory card. As long as your video footage has been saved to this card by the phone's camera, you can pop the card out and insert it into a card reader connected to your PC. Card readers are cheap and simple to add if your PC doesn't already have one. You can then simply drag the video file to your hard disk.

Video-equipped phones usually also have the ability to connect directly to a PC's USB port. You may need to buy a cable if none was included with the phone. Again, you may then be able to see the phone's memory card as a removable storage device in Windows and drag files from it. In other cases you'll also need special software from a CD that came with your phone. This will allow you to browse the phone's memory and drag files across.

If your phone has Bluetooth, you can connect it wirelessly using a Bluetooth dongle plugged into your PC's USB port (or built-in Bluetooth on some laptops). With Bluetooth activated between the devices, you can highlight the video file you want to use and beam it to the PC, though rather slowly.

Capturing from camera

Many compact digital cameras allow you to shoot video as well as stills. Video is stored on the camera's flash memory card, and as with a mobile phone you can either connect the camera to the PC via USB to copy files directly, or remove the memory card and insert it in a card reader.

Digital video cameras

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offer the best quality of footage, especially if you choose one of the latest HD (high definition) models. Even affordable consumer models offer close to professional image quality. However, the full high-resolution footage that you see on your PC or TV will need to be cut down and somewhat reduced in quality for the purposes of online sharing. Services such as YouTube compress video to make files smaller and faster to download.

Getting video from a digital camcorder onto your PC is pretty simple, but slower than the options above, typically transferring while you play the footage through from beginning to end. You'll need video capture software to do this; at least a basic version should be supplied with your camera. The latest tapeless AVCHD camcorders work with a smaller range of software so far.

Converting file formats

Once you have a video file on your PC, you're ready to start editing it and preparing it for upload. However, things are never quite that simple. There are lots of video formats; various devices can use subtly different ones, and Windows doesn't support them all.

Capturing video from a digital camcorder will most likely create an enormous, uncompressed AVI file on your hard disk. Though unwieldy, this should be usable by any editing software you might have, including Windows Movie Maker, which is included with Windows XP and Vista.

Mobile phones save video in a variety of file formats. Windows can't handle all of these without some extra help. Most 3G phones, for example, use '3GP' files for video. You'll need special software such as the VLC media player (www.videolan.org/vlc) to even watch these files, and Windows Movie Maker won't work with them at all.

You may be lucky and have a device that creates files already optimised for uploading. Toshiba's Camileo Pro digital video camera, for example, creates AVI files encoded in the MPEG-4 format. This is pretty much ideal for YouTube, although you'll still need to convince Windows to edit the file if you want to make changes.