Videobox: Download Videos in a Snap

I’ll be frank. I am a big fan of internet video sites. YouTube, Break.com, CollegeHumor, and a plethora of others all capture my attention and give me short termed entertainment. Sometimes, I’ll stumble upon a video that I like so much, that I want to download a copy to my computer to watch at a later time. While some sites allow you to do this, many don’t make it easy.

Enter Videobox, from Tasty Apps. This awesome little application does one thing, and does it pretty darn well. As the name implies, it is a standalone application that lets you drop the URL of almost any video that you find on the web, and it downloads the video, and then converts it into MPEG format for viewing on an iPod or just on your computer. Read on to see what else this handy app can do.

One of the biggest advantages of Videobox is the wide range of online video sites that it supports. It obviously supports YouTube, as well as most other popular video sites. I tested YouTube, CollegeHumor, and Break with no problems.

To use this super simple app, just navigate in your web browser to any of your favorite video sharing sites, and pull up the video. Then, just click a couple of times in the address bar until it’s all selected. Then, drag the whole address right onto the Videobox window. It will tell you that it’s loading, and then after a few seconds a thumbnail along with a bunch of other information will pop up.

Just hit the down arrow button next to the video, and it will start the download process, and then proceed to converting it for a compatible format with your Mac. The time it takes depends upon your internet connection, size of the video, and the specs of your particular Mac.

Once it’s done downloading, import it into iTunes, save it into a folder, or just leave it where it is. But next time you want to watch it, you won’t need an internet connection to have that ability.

Although there are many similar apps that allow you to download Flash videos from online video sites, Videobox is probably one of the most polished by far. It has a nice, simple, clean interface, and the ease of use is really just phenomenal.

Hopefully, in a future release, Tasty Apps can find a way to add a button right to Safari to allow you to have it automatically download the video, similarly to what another Tasty Apps’ app does, Web Snapper. A nice little button at the top of my screen would make it that much easier to capture any video I want, and there would be no need for this drag and drop business.

Overall, this is a really great app, and it does its task very well.

Videobox is available from Tasty Apps and costs $8 (while in “Pre-order”, and then it goes to $15)

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