If you’re not an iPhone owner, then you’re probably not going to be interested by this post. If you don’t like custom ringtones then you’re definitely not going to be interested by this post. If you’re still reading, I’ll explain you quickly how to convert youtube videos to iphone ringtones.

This is basically going to be a quick walkthrough rather than a long explanation. Basically you need a way to download the youtube video (like youtube-dl) and ffmpeg compiled with faac support.

For FreeBSD users, this is as simple as installing the two ports: net/youtube_dl and multimedia/ffmpeg (make sure to run ‘make config’ and check that FAAC is on). For MacOS X users, the easiest way will be to download youtube-dl to your home directory (and put it in /usr/local/bin if you wish) and install ffmpeg following these instructions. Windows users can install iRinger (haven’t tried it but it looks quite nifty).

Ok, now for the actual information (this is actually pretty easy).

First, find a video you like (in my case, Bird is the word in Family Guy) and download it.

$ youtube-dl 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WNrx2jq184'

Then drop the video part and convert the MPEG stream to AAC.

$ ffmpeg -i 2WNrx2jq184.flv -f ipod -vn birdistheword.m4r

Alright, that’s it! Wait, I want to get rid of the first few seconds and the last few seconds as well. Let’s just play it in mplayer (or QuickTime, or iTunes) and find the offset (-ss option) then the length (-t option). The -y option is to force overwrite the output file.

$ ffmpeg -i 2WNrx2jq184.flv -f ipod -vn -ss 28.6 -t 44.2 -y birdistheword.m4r

Once this is finished, just send the ringtone to the iPhone, either using scp if your iphone is jailbroken (put it in /Library/Ringtones/) or via iTunes (just drag and drop it in Ringtones, then sync the iPhone). Enjoy!