15-Minute Reviews :: Wondershare YouTube Downloader v1.0.16

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Wondershare YouTube Downloader version 1.0.16 by Wondershare Software – An application geared towards the download and conversion of YouTube video.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Wondershare YouTube Downloader is a YouTube batch downloader and converter. It will download multi YouTube videos in one time and convert them into AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, 3GP, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MOV, RM, ASF, OGG, etc. Wondershare YouTube Downloader can even automatically detect the YouTube video files from the YouTube.com and download them onto your computer.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is relatively easy to use and get going
• Automatic file grabber a plus
• Batch conversion setup is good
• Ability to limit simultaneous downloads and download speed a bonus
• Selection of output formats quite extensive

Quick Cons

• Only compatible with YouTube
• Would be beneficial to be able to grab title for files
• Files did not output to the location chosen on first try
• Playback in application and conversion lacking quality
• System intensive – A bit of a CPU hog

Expansion

Upon your first launch of this application, you are greeted with a dialog box asking you if you want to enable the auto recording feature every time you launch the application. Once you have completed this, you will see a pleasant-looking application with a fairly easy-to-use interface. Some unique aspects of the interface is that the tree-based left-pane which normally offers you sections such as Downloading, Conversions and various categories can be changed into a timeline-based layout for quick reference of what may have been downloaded previously. Overall the interface is decent for the most part, though I felt that the window should be resizable since that some of the information in the right pane on the videos are presented.

There are a lot of handy features in this application. The Recorder functionality automatically watches for you to arrive at YouTube videos and then will proceed to automatically grab them for you; The Recorder functionality also pops up a small window on the System Tray which allows you to cancel the download instead of entering the application to cancel/delete the video. The ability to set up a series of files with conversion settings and queue them for batching, as well as continue using the application during conversion is fairly handy. You can also set the limitation of how many simultaneous downloads as well as the used bandwidth, which is a great idea so that your browsing doesn’t suffer while you download videos.

I was surprised at the selection of conversion presets – Well over 40 altogether. To top this off, you can also change the settings; While most of the settings are limited to a drop-down box, there is a fairly decent number of options to choose from. I mention that most settings are in a drop-down box; I did find that even through the resolution has a drop-down box, you can actually still manually input a resolution as well.

I did have some concerns and issues however. First off, this application is only compatible with YouTube. I tried the auto and manual capabilities of the application with a number of other video sites, but it wouldn’t grab anything else; With so many other products out there that will grab from a large selection of sites (Or even grab and flv it sees), it seems pretty underpowered. It seems like a common weakness of quite a few of the video downloaders I’ve tried is the inability to attempt to attach a file name to the video; It would be great with an application if it would also grab the video title (From the title html tag maybe?) of the video and attach that, or give some options. This application automatically names the files YouTubeX.flv, where X is a sequential number.

While the application as a whole seems not too bad, when it came to video playback within the application as well as conversion, I bumped into some pretty serious issues. First, I decided I wanted to try to take the list of 18 videos I got and convert them to mp3 for testing. I set a custom folder and let the converter go away. When it was done, I attempted to open a file for playback from the folder, to find the folder was empty. I also tried right-clicking on a converted file in the Conversion List and clicking ‘Open Folder’, and it took me to that folder as well. After a moment, I went and checked the default folder and sure enough, they were there instead. I tried to reproduce this again, but every conversion after the first it seemed to put the files where I asked, so I’m not sure where this bug came from.

The built-in video playback functionality is extremely poor. All the videos ended up looking pixelated even at its default window size, and the audio synchronization ends up drifting very fast; Every video I tested had this issue, and some were worse than others. One in specific had visible blocks that were rather sizable – It’s thumbnail preview was really tiny as well. I tried converting quite a few to a bunch of formats and while this pixalation went away with conversion, the synchronization of the audio to video ended up there still; I tested the videos on another system as well and still had the same experience. The video I mentioned above had the blocking issue even in the converted forms as well.

One last thing I should mention is the CPU usage. It starts out very reasonable between the two threads that are running to start with, but after my testing I found the idle CPU usage crept up to an average of 15 percent and moving the window made the application and the whole system unresponsive for a few moments. Restarting the application cleared this up, and I didn’t have enough time to see if it would do it again, but it does appear to be an issue.

Final Verdict

While the interface and the general download functionality is comfortably usable overall, I found that the conversion functionality was less then stellar – Far less quality than others I’ve tested in the past. For free, this may make a good downloader for those who are looking for one today but I’d recommend using the conversion minimally. As for paying $25.00, this wouldn’t have been a bad title, except the conversion issue, as well as the CPU creep and the odd folder bug.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, November 22, 2007