Freemake Video Downloader

What is Freemake Video Downloader

Freemake Video Downloader is a Windows program that downloads videos from a Web URL and converts them to various formats or saves them in the original format on your computer.

When you first download the installation file, you can install Freemake Video Downloader by double-clicking the file, selecting your installation preferences and clicking "Install." At the end of the installation, you can run the application by clicking "Finish."

The user interface may be intuitive for some users and counter-intuitive for others. The way you download videos is by copying a video URL to the clipboard and clicking "Paste URL" in the main window. You have the option to download the video in its original format or convert it to a wide range of formats, including MP4, 3GP, FLV and others. You can save hard drive space by reducing the video quality or resolution.

Freemake Video Downloader works with any video URL that supports direct downloads, such as YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook videos. Many websites don't allow downloading their videos, however, so Freemake won't work with these sites. Examples of incompatible sites include Hulu, Netflix, Crackle and other subscription services.

One nice feature of Freemake is that it integrates seamlessly with Mozilla Firefox, so you can download videos directly from an icon in the add-on toolbar. When you download a file, a settings menu pops up and allows you to choose your video format and resolution. The menu includes various video codecs as well as video container formats, so a large number of playback devices are supported.

Depending on the size of the video, it can take some time to download, and converting a large file can more than double the amount of time it takes to save the video on your hard drive. This drawback is the same for any video downloader or converter.

While the Freemake Video Downloader interface is appealing and modern, it doesn't offer many additional features, such as the ability to split videos or merge multiple files. You can extract audio from a file instead of saving it as a video file. For example, if you want to download a music video from YouTube to play on an MP3 player, you can select "Extract Original Audio" from the options menu before downloading. However, you don't have the option to convert the audio to a different format.

After downloading and converting a video, you can open the file in your default video player by clicking "Play" next to the file name. This feature is handy but could be more convenient if the program included a video player. As the video downloads, you can view the progress in the application window, and if you need to take a break, you can temporarily stop the download by clicking "Pause."

Pros

• Free
• Simple to use
• Includes a Firefox add-on
• Extracts audio

Cons

• Doesn't convert audio files
• Browser plugin lacks features