YTD Video Downloader

YTD Video Downloader is more than a Youtube downloader. It allows you to download HD and HQ videos, from dozens of sites and convert them to other video formats. The program is easy to use. Just specify the URL, similar to a Youtube downloader, for the video you want to download and click the Download button. From there, YTD Video Downloader will download the video from the URL you specified. The program also allows you to convert downloaded videos for iPad, iPod, iPhone, PSP, Cell Phone, Windows Media, and XVid, or play video that you have previously downloaded or converted.

The YTD Video Downloader interface includes a tabbed format for easy downloading, converting, and playing, and a new Activity tab allows you to keep track of multiple downloads and conversions in real time. The program has the ability to download full playlists as opposed to just one video.

What's new in this version: You can save videos from some streaming sites which were experiencing issues.

Downloading worked very well for popular video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Blip.TV. As in previous reviews, YTD Video Downloader quickly saved the default MP4 file to the directory of my choice, which is easily selected or created from the main screen. I tried various CNET and "creative commons"-tagged videos on YouTube and had excellent download speeds. I was sure to try out the most recently added site that YTD supports--the Chinese video site Youku--and was able to download a wonderful beetle animation easily, though it did break longer videos into multiple files (see below).

The free version of YTD Video Download only allows downloading to the MP4 video format, so the additional conversion functionality for changing the file to WMV, AVI, or MP3 is welcome, but why not just convert the download on the fly? Converting video files worked acceptably well, although I did crash the app once converting a Download Video Preview from MP4 to MP3. The conversion completed, but the program become unresponsive and I had to force quit. I experienced other occasional brief program hangs when downloading large videos from foreign sites.