aTube Catcher

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on September 11, 2012

If you generally skip to the back of a review to read the results, we'll save you the trouble and state up front that aTube Catcher is the YouTube downloader to get. Not just because it's one of the few free and non-ad-supported tools of its kind, though that ought to be enough because it means it's not ad-linked and can download videos from lots of other Web sites, too, including Google, Dailymotion, Yahoo, Comedy Central, Spike, and many others. But aTube Catcher is actually a video toolkit packing many free tools such as DVD/Blu-Ray/CD Creator, DA DVD Ripper, Video & Audio Crop Tool, Queue Manager, Screen Record, Audio Recorder, and others. Some are built in while others require free downloads but integrate fully with aTube Catcher. This program also creates animated GIFs, Audio CDs, ringtones, and MP3s. It captures video streams, converts and merges videos, and erases rewriteable disks, too.

Neat, clean, and compact sums up aTube Catcher's dialog-size user interface, which opens on the Normal mode tab. This is the program's main tool, its video downloader. It's a lot like the others, with some notable (and welcome) exceptions, such as the Enable YouTube HD check box. Better yet, an Output Profile drop-down list offers dozens of different devices and formats, everything from AVI to Zune. It also offers No Conversion, NTSC and PAL TV formats, animated GIF, HD, and lots of other interesting choices. The other tabs access the program's other capable, no-nonsense tools: Stream Catcher, Screen Record, Video Converter, and more. As if that weren't enough, clicking the Tools menu revealed still more utilities as well as the General Settings, Cache, Language, and YouTube options. Add a Video Search Tool and MP3 Downloader to the tool list, incidentally.

Does it seem like aTube Catcher offers a bit too much? Nonsense! Just click Help on the toolbar. This program has one of the longest Help menus we've seen, including the Web-based Manual that opened as soon as our installation completed, as well as links to download codecs, WinpCap, and an Encoder Version. If you skipped to the end, we'll say it again: just get it.