Clip Extractor

From music videos and 1980s commercials to tutorials and funny cats — and everything in between — YouTube contains innumerable hours of streaming video entertainment. If you’d like to snag a video and save it to your computer for offline viewing, there are plenty of utilities that can help you with that, including Clip Extractor. Although Clip Extractor isn’t as packed with features as some other options, it makes quick work of saving YouTube videos as AVI files.

Clip Extractor’s interface is straightforward and easy to figure out, consisting of a single screen. To save a video, you simply copy the YouTube URL, paste it into the appropriate box, then select the desired screen size and quality. Choose the location on your computer where you want to save the file and click Start Download; a progress meter will show the program’s activity and let you know when it’s done. If you’re particularly fond of a video’s soundtrack, Clip Extractor will also let you use up to 30 seconds of it to create a ringtone, which can be saved as an MP3, MR4, or WAV file. There’s no Help file, but everything about Clip Extractor is easy to figure out. Overall, Clip Extractor is not the most sophisticated or full-featured option we’ve seen for downloading YouTube Videos, but it gets high marks for its ease of use and trouble-free performance. We think it’s a great choice for anyone who wants to download YouTube videos without a lot of fuss.

Clip Extractor installs and uninstalls without issues.