YouTube Snagger is a standalone application for Windows that can be used to download videos from YouTube. The program does not offer a search which I personally see as a big negative, as it means that you need to open a web browser, copy the web address of a video that you like to download, paste it into the application’s interface before you can start configuring the download options and download the video.
A search simplifies the download task considerably and tools like TubeQueue or Free FLV Converter show how its done (check the guide linked above for links). That’s however the only negative as far as this review goes.
YouTube Snagger’s interface has been streamlined for quick downloading of videos. You paste a Youtube video url into the form at the top, select the desired video quality (for instance best available or 4096p) and click the Check Video button afterwards. The program tries to pull data from YouTube and either returns the status that the video can be added or that no video has been found. You need to click on Add video to add the video to the download queue.
A download window will pop up where you need to select a download location on the local hard drive. You can visit the options later to configure the program to bypass the download dialog. New video downloads will then be saved automatically to the standard save location selected in the options.
It would have been nice if the developer would have added an option to automatically start the download, for instance if check video found a video on the pasted url. This would make the whole process more comfortable and reduce the button clicks considerable.
All YouTube videos are listed with their filename, download folder, quality and video title in the program window. This window acts as a queue, and videos are not downloaded until you hit the Download videos button at the bottom right of the screen.
This spawns a new window that displays the download progress, speeds and overall progress.
It is unfortunately not possible to use the main interface while the download window is open. Make sure you have added all the videos that want to download from YouTube before you hit that download videos button.
If you look at the positives you find a responsive application that can download multiple videos from YouTube in a quality that you specify.
The things that take it down a notch are the missing YouTube search option, the to many buttons in the interface, no option to play a video from the interface, or at least launch it in the default player, and that downloaded videos do not get removed automatically from the queue.
You can download the latest version of YouTube Snagger from the developers website.
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