Computer Realm

Software portals are saturated with so called ‘Youtube downloaders’ which let you download videos off Youtube and other similar sites like DailyMotion, Metacafe and Spike (previously known as iFilm), so much that it is hard to pick which one does its job perfectly because they all do the same thing. Differentiating which one is better has boiled onto whether you could actually download sites from their ‘supported list of sites’ or it just returns an error.

I recently talked about another Firefox Addon called UnPlug which was quite an impressive Addon to say the least but I was just browsing through which is the ‘ultimate’ application or Addon which does the job best and it turns out DownloadHelper is THE best.

Once you install the Addon the only glimpse of the Addon is a ‘grayed’ button on the navigation bar next to the address bar which basically gets ‘colored’ and animates when it detects a video (you can decide if it animates or just stays static but I think the animation is pretty cool) and believe me it detects ANY video. Once it starts animating all you have to do is click on the arrow on the right of the button and download it! It’s as simple as that.

Clicking the button itself brings up a tiny window complete with all supported sites including the rating, the number of comments for the site submitted by users of the Addon and something called ‘Interest’ but I think it would save them quite a bit of coding and give users a bigger picture if they just say ‘all sites supported’!

One drawback I found is that it does not integrate into any download manager which can make things a bit ‘slow’ but there’s always a solution. You’ll have to control + click the download link which would just copy the link to the clipboard and you can add the URL from there to your favorite download manager.

Finally, IE and Opera users you might want to install Firefox just to use this Addon, believe me you don’t know what you are missing!

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