Graboid Video

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on September 09, 2012

Graboid Video grabs video online from a variety of intermediary sites, including high-quality and HD videos. It doesn't host or share video; instead, it searches for the titles you want to watch and shows you what's available, both exact and near matches. You can preview or play the videos (using the included VLC Media Player) or flag them for later. You can filter searches and sort videos by category, too, and add tags that other users can see. Graboid Video is shareware that's free to try, including a free account, though the trial limits downloads to 2GB and no HD content.

Graboid Video's installer includes VLC Media Player, though if (like us) you already have it, you can skip that step. Graboid's user interface is about par for the course in appearance, with a prominent search box and tabbed features: Videos, Downloads, Flagged, News, Account, Help, Messages, and Preferences -- all clear and to the point. The program opened with the latest downloads displayed, including some popular movies. Graboid doesn't display the sites it searches. Plenty of free videos are available from sites like the Moving Image Archive, but some sites host videos shared by unauthorized users. We're certainly not interested in downloading copyrighted material, and the trial limits what's available, so we entered a search for an old, dark movie. After previewing the content, we clicked Download. Graboid downloaded and saved our video, indicating "you have this" with a green icon when it finished. We had no trouble figuring out Graboid, but a good help file is available, too.

We opened the default destination folder and clicked our finished download, which played normally in VLC. That clearly demonstrated Graboid's capabilities, and we have no problem in recommending the program based on its performance, even with the trial limitations. But we recommend using Graboid Video with care since it not only downloads potentially copyrighted material by also adult content (as indicated on the sidebar menu). Graboid's not responsible for what others host or what you download since it's mostly a download manager, just one optimized for finding online video downloads.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Graboid Video 3.26.