Download Online Videos With Web Video Cap

Online videos are in high demand and one of the most popular pastime on today’s Internet. Services like Youtube, Dailymotion, Hulu or Gametrailers are visited by millions of users each week. The videos that are hosted on those sites can only be viewed online and it is understandable that many Internet users are looking for ways to download the videos to their local computer systems to be able to watch them as often as they want or to transfer them to other devices like cell phones or the television.

We have covered several ways to download Youtube videos in the past of which many are also compatible with other online video sites.

The portable program Web Video Cap for Windows is another alternative that has not been mentioned in the article listed above. The software is a general purpose downloader for videos. It works with many video hosting sites out there including Youtube. The main difference in comparison to most other video download tools is that Web Video Cap runs silently in the background recording videos as they are watched by the user. This is on the one hand a very comfortable way of downloading videos as zero user input is required after starting the capture mode in the software. It does on the other hand have a few disadvantages since all videos that are watched are downloaded automatically unless the capturing process is stopped by the user in Web Video Cap.

Here is how it works. Web Video Cap is a portable software program that can be run from where it has been download and unpacked. It requires the free WinPcap library which needs to be installed before startup.

The options are displayed on the screen after starting up Web Video Cap. The user needs to select the WinPCap driver as the capture method, select a save folder if the default folder is not the right one and pick the file types and streams that should be captured automatically.

We suggest to enable the option to delete downloaded files that are smaller than 100 Kilobytes to get rid of advertisements and the like automatically.

A click on the start capture button starts the monitoring of the network adapter. Online videos are automatically stored in the save folder when they are recognized by Web Video Cap. The capture can be stopped at anytime by clicking on the stop capture button.

Make sure to read the known limitations section on the developer’s website if you encounter sites that do not work with the program. Web Video Cap can be downloaded from the Nirsoft website.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday April 2, 2010 -
Tags:online videos, portable software, windows software, youtube

Responses so far:

1. Barbarosa says:

   April 2, 2010 at 5:38 pm

   I’ve been using another Nirsoft product, VideoCacheView, to save played videos:
   http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/video_cache_view.html .
   It doesn’t save automatically, but I think I’ll stick with it. I can save anything in my video cache, and I selectively save only the items I really want.
   To use Video Cache View, you just start it, select the files you want from its list, and press F7 to copy to a folder of your choice. I find it simple and fast enough to be of value to me.

   Reply
2. DanTe says:

   April 3, 2010 at 9:30 pm

   Thanks. Been looking for something like this that does not require I open my browser to another site to decode and download the videos.

   Reply