The success of sites like YouTube and Google Video that promote video sharing suggests that this is an area that will only continue to grow in popularity. Portable multimedia players, mobile phones and gaming handhelds that support video content are a decent alternative to a PC for downloading and viewing media, but to date it's been notoriously difficult to transfer between such platforms without incident.

The more astute videophile will be aware of a range of free online tools that can help, but these can be fiddly to use unless you know what you're doing. In an attempt to appeal to the consumer with an all-in-one package, X-oom has released Internet Movies 3, dubbed YouTube Edition, to set its stall out as an online solution.

The Internet video functionality allows you to upload or download content to and from YouTube, Google Video, ClipFish or MyVideo. Uploading is usually fairly easy to do using the tools on the sites, but you're given the option to fill in a couple of forms via the software to run things from here instead.

An additional tool to download content is slightly more helpful, as this can often be tad awkward, particularly if you want it saved in a generic format like MPEG. Once you've grabbed the video's URL from the site you can paste it into the interface here and choose between FLV and MPEG formats to save to your hard drive.

You'll also find tools here to rip DVDs to file, burn files to DVD format and convert files from one format to another. Typically you're given a choice between presets for specific devices such as the PSP, iPod, Pocket PC or a mobile phone, optical disc formats like DVD, SVCD and VCD, or you can choose custom parameters yourself.

We noticed a fair few glitches here, such as the software's inability to preview video clips stored on your hard drive regardless of format, and inaccurate settings being displayed during conversion. You're also fairly limited in the makes and models of phone or Pocket PC to encode to, although the range of resolutions and codecs supported to tailor this for yourself is pretty comprehensive.

Finally if you want a bit more control over the conversion process you'll find an 'Expert Mode', which allows you to create a storyboard of clips and splice out sections you don't want, such as intro sequences, advert breaks or credits. There are also some rudimentary tools here to create DVD menus that certainly won't add much in terms of style but do offer some practical appeal.

X-oom's video management suite is pretty basic at best, with the majority of tools centred around converting from one format or platform to another. The 'YouTube Edition' functionality is a marginal time-saver and, although there are a couple of nice ideas in the Expert Mode, you'll find all of this and far more in dedicated video editing applications and multimedia suites. The software is also a bit temperamental, with some tools appearing to not work at all, occasional crashes for undetermined reasons and a basic yet rather unfriendly interface.

X-oom Internet Movies 3 offers a handful of timesavers for converting and transferring video but there are no real editing tools here and most of the functionality would be duplicated by the tools provided with your portable device or the site you're grabbing video from. Based on this and some rather irritating crashes and design issues, we'd call it a passable solution at best.