Download TED videos with TED Downloader 3.0

We have covered the TED Downloader back in 2011 for the first time that you could use to download all videos from TED talks. If you have not heard about TED before I suggest you check out the site to get an impression of what it is all about. If you are short on time, lets say that it offers talks by experts in fields like technology, global issues or science that are often remarkable in one way or the other.

The talks may give you a glimpse of the future, provide solutions to current issues, or may be informative in another way. They are usually held in a way that viewers with little to no background in the field can understand the main concepts.

Back to Ted Downloader. The program has been released in a new version recently, which improves on the previous versions considerably. A lot has changed since our first review of the program, and while some of the features have been integrated into previous updates, version 3.0 introduces additional improvements.

If you have only used the very first version of the program you will now notice that all Ted talks are listed in the application interface with their speaker, title, location, year and month, and play time. What version 3.0 adds on top of that is a search option that you can use to find topics or speakers of interest. Want to download Bill Gates' speak? Just enter Gates and you will see all three videos of Bill Gates. Just select the one your are interested in and the program jumps automatically to that video. What's left is the selection of the video and a click on the start download button.

If you just want to download everything, you can instead check the download all videos box in the program interface to do so. Be aware that you will download 1225 videos which may require Gigabytes of storage space. You can select low, normal or high quality videos in the settings - automatically displayed on first start - which impact the size of each video that you download. The normal videos are usually in the 2-digit Megabyte range.

The author of the application has added another cool feature to the program. TED Talks are in English with subtitles provided for various languages. The program lets you select a subtitle language in the settings, and you can then select to download subtitles for the videos that you download automatically. Other features that you may like is a skip button for individual videos, options to save the settings or the link list as HTML, XML or TXT files.

TED Downloader 3.0 features impressive improvements over previous versions. As impressive as it is, I can still think of a few features that would make it even better. For one, there should be an option to select all videos that pop up in the search results. To take the Bill Gates examples: if I want to download all three videos, I have to search three times for Bill Gates to do so.

Other features that I'd like to see is integration of TED ratings and categories, the option to schedule downloads of new videos, and the option to stop and resume downloads at a later point in time.

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