Mac Video Downloader for Mac

Featuring a video converter and a Web browser with an embedded media downloader, Mac Video Downloader for Mac helps you find and grab audio and video files from virtually any video-sharing Web site. This premium app manages to detect approximately 90 percent of all videos, with a 100 percent success rate for popular sites like YouTube and Vimeo, but it eats a lot of system resources.

After a quick installation, Mac Video Downloader launches its built-in browser. The browser, itself, behaves just like Safari with one exception: it lets you change the User Agent between Mac, iOS, and Android, effectively emulating the Web browsers of mobile devices. As soon as you land on a page with embedded audio or video content, Mac Video Downloader will pop up a window through which you can choose which file to download. The download is generally fast, but it depends of course on your connection. The conversion is also relatively fast; we were able to convert a four-minute FLV file to an MP4 in about 20 seconds. When it comes to performance, however, the app leaves a large footprint: over 500MB of RAM.

Mac Video Downloader provides an all-in-one solution for anyone who wants to download and convert media files for their mobile devices or just to keep locally on their Mac. While this app does its job well, the price tag and the large amount of RAM it eats are two big disadvantages, especially when comparing the app to the many free and better optimized options out there.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Mac Video Downloader for Mac 2.5.