Have you ever wanted to download movies from YouTube or Google Video? You may want to store it for viewing later on, or to send the clip to friends.

I am often asked how to do this and here is my favourite solution out of the many possible ways to do this.

aTube Catcher (formerly YouTube Video Catcher) is one of the many programs that will extract video from YouTube, but it stands out for a number of reasons.

• aTube Catcher is free.
• You can download movies from over 60 video sharing sites.
• You can point it at a playlist to download multiple movies in one hit.
• It lets you encode the movie into just about any format you could want, including a number of mobile formats i.e. Ipod.
• No further encoding is required once you have downloaded the movie as this does it all.
• It is a stand alone application.

aTube Catcher is very easy to use. All you need to do is:

1. Go to the website which contains the movie
2. Copy the URL
3. Paste it in aTube Catcher
4. Select what format you want to save it as
5. Press “Download”

YouTube encourages its visitors to email the link instead of the movie itself. I see that as being the best solution in most cases. Saying that, I am sure you have your reasons to grab these videos.

There are a number of websites which work in a similar way to this program. You can paste the URL in and download the movie. I prefer the control that this stand alone application offers, but if you would like to try these sites, Google “YouTube grabber”. The list long so I have not added it in here.

aTube Catcher is available for free from their website.