Peggo online DVR puts YouTube and SoundCloud on your desktop

It’s safe to say that most people have favorite YouTube audio or video content that they’d like to save for viewing offline — over and over again — and there’s a host of apps and even browser extensions that will help you do that.

Peggo is an easy-to-use digital video recorder (DVR) that records MP3 audio from YouTube videos, and it caught my eye for a number of reasons.

As an online app, there’s no software download or registration — just paste the URL into the window, and the app brings up the interface for the selection you chose. It has cool features such as integrated search, automatic silence removal, audio normalization, subtrack offsets, and artist and title tags that are automatically populated or that you can fill in.

Peggo has also announced new support for SoundCloud whereby members of that service can now use Peggo to record their favorite SoundCloud tracks in the same ways as YouTube.

If you’re recording video, you get a choice of resolutions from 720p HD to a tiny 144p. Peggo automatically removes unwanted silence from the beginning and end of videos. It also normalizes the volume of every recording to the same level so there’s no drastic differences between selections.

Right from the interface, you can like, dislike and subscribe to a feed. Mousing over the timeline lets you see exactly where to trim. There’s even built-in integrated Facebook, Twitter and Google+ sharing.

You can also import the MP4 file into iTunes and load it on your phone to ease your train commute.

Peggo is brought to you by the folks behind the now defunct Dirpy, and it’s nice to see them back with this neat, useful, free app.

Is it legal? Here is Peggo’s statement:

For users in the United States, and countries with similar laws, Peggo is perfectly legal. Peggo is a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) that lets you make personal recordings of publicly available online media for later use, also known as time-shifting, and is protected by the Supreme Court’s Betamax ruling (Sony Corporation of America vs Universal City Studios). For context, this is the same ruling that protects the millions of DVRs like Tivo in half of American households.

➤ Peggo