iRadar: The Man With No Life – A Simple & Free Way To Download YouTube Videos

Friday, July 29, 2011

The Man With No Life – A Simple & Free Way To Download YouTube Videos

The Man With No Life – A Simple & Free Way To Download YouTube Videos: "

I have been professionally blogging about software for over two years now, and The Man With No Life is hands-down the best name for an app I’ve covered so far. It has absolutely nothing to do with what the application does, and couldn’t be farther than traditional SEO wisdom. In a nutshell, it’s a free YouTube downloader for Windows.

When you open the app, you’re greeted with a huge, intrusive banner and Facebook friends area:

Fortunately, that can quickly be fixed simply by resizing the window (thanks for not disabling the option to resize the window, Man With No Life). After resizing the window, the interface looks much saner:

That’s more like it. There isn’t even a scroll bar. Next, let’s switch over to the Search window. This is no more than an embedded browser with Google as its default search (yes, Google rather than YouTube, for some reason). You can also paste in the full URL for any video you wish to download:

As soon as you see the title (“Did you hear a click?” in this case) in the top-left text box, you can click Download. You are then taken to the Transfers tab, where you can watch the video download:

… or fail miserably, if the title happens to have a question mark or other strange characters. In that case, just drop the special characters and hope for the best. It worked for the video above, as you can see. Once the download is complete, you can switch over to the My Library tab so see your video. Sadly, the context menu is not very informative, and the file path is not listed.

To see where your files actually get saved, you’ll need to switch over to the Settings tab.

Here you can see the default path for the files, as well as the quality setting. This is a bit of a simplification, as YouTube offers MP4-compressed files in multiple resolutions, so saying MP4 is “Highest quality” is not completely accurate.

Alternatives

Is the Man With No Life the best way to download YouTube videos? Definitely not. To be honest, the main thing it’s got going for it is the name. The interface is simple, which is good, but novice users may have trouble figuring out where their download went. There are several other services you can use if you want to download videos off YouTube. My personal favorite is JDownloader, which is a Java-based solution so it’s quite heavy (but can do lots more other than download YouTube videos).

If JDownloader is a bit too heavy for you, you might be interested in an online alternative such as Keep Tube. It couldn’t be simpler to use: All you need to do is edit the URL for the video in your browser put the word keep right before youtube. So to download a video with a URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRBcP6MmE8g you would just need to change it to http://www.keepyoutube.com/watch?v=cRBcP6MmE8g . Keep Tube also uses Java, but as a browser plug-in, and is very lean and fast. It doesn’t have a crazy name like The Man With No Life, but it’s very usable.

What’s your preferred way to download videos off YouTube? Let us know in the comments.

The Man With No Life – A Simple & Free Way To Download YouTube Videos is a post from: MakeUseOf