Faster Downloader

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on October 03, 2012

There are so many easy ways to download streaming media these days that we find absolutely no reason to bother with a program that's the least bit complicated. For that reason, we recommend that users who want to download video and music from streaming sites (where that's permitted, of course) look for something other than Faster Downloader to do it with. This unintuitive program left us scratching our head and wondering why the creators had so needlessly complicated what should be a simple process.

Faster Downloader boasts that it's "fully integrated" with Firefox and Internet Explorer, but the first thing that we noticed was that it wasn't compatible with the latest version of Firefox, and it didn't seem to turn up in Internet Explorer anywhere at all. So much for browser integration. We tested the program on its own, which took a bit of experimentation, as the interface is vague and there's no Help file. We finally determined that if we copied the URL of a video that we wanted and then clicked the Add button, the program would give us the option to download it. There were a few other buttons and drop-down menus in this part of the interface that weren't clearly labeled, and we never did find out what they did.

We managed to successfully download some videos -- sort of. They didn't come with any kind of file extension, and we weren't able to select a download format or convert the files once we had them. The program comes with a VLC Media Player download, but VLC couldn't handle these files either. We finally determined that we could open them with our browser, which displayed not only the video that we wanted, but the entire page that we downloaded it from. We never were able to figure out how to simply download a video in a common format to be played by a regular media player. For this reason, we recommend skipping the hassle of Faster Downloader.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Faster Downloader 1.7.