Youtube Grabber + Accelerator

YouTube Grabber & Accelerator is a free YouTube downloader that actually works well, even in Windows 7. It’s also a download accelerator that speeds downloads by simultaneously combining multiple threads as they’re downloaded and displays useful data while it’s doing it.

Downloading Flash videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites with YouTube Grabber & Accelerator is as easy as copying and pasting a URL. We browsed to YouTube and selected some short animation. We copied the page’s URL from our browser’s address bar into YouTube Grabber and clicked Start. A compact download dialog opened with a green progress bar displaying total progress and a blue bar displaying each segment simultaneously, with a more detailed view below; clicking Details minimized this view. Checkboxes and buttons let you play files, open containing folders, or close the dialog on command or automatically. A small pop-up near the system tray advised us our download was completed; a useful reminder for long downloads. We were able to play our downloaded file as well as open the containing folder from this notification, too. We clicked Play, and the video opened in our default media player, a perfect copy, as far as we could tell. Using YouTube Grabber, we easily copied several small videos in the public domain and saved them. We also opened several instances of the program and made simultaneous downloads. We successfully downloaded short Flash videos from other sites, too, including Toonheads.tv, but other videos and sites like Hulu didn’t work. And, while it’s easy enough to move downloaded videos, we wish the program let you select a destination directory up front. There’s no Help file, but it’s a pretty straightforward setup.

If you’ve ever tried a free YouTube downloader and wondered why you bothered, give YouTube Grabber & Download Accelerator a shot. It does what it promises; namely, grab and save videos from YouTube, and even some other embedded video sites, too.