We’ve written about saving online videos before using Freecorder but this time we’re going to look at Realplayer.  Realplayer is free, at least the version we use is free, but they offer premium versions as well. The premium software includes more features but we like free at Computers Made Simple. We feel that the no-cost version works just fine, thank you.

Real had some problems in the early years of the Internet. Maybe you don’t remember those days but Real was pretty much shunned by early Internet users because they included bits of malware in their software. OK, it wasn’t really malware but the original Realplayer kept track of many things that a user did on the Internet and sent that information off to Real, without the user being aware of it. Now, Realplayer seems pretty safe, even though Google’s StopBadware.org has named Realplayer as badware. We can’t find dates on any of the articles we researched on this but, to us anyway, Realplayer seems quite safe. The two knocks against it were that Realplayer would have pop-up ads, which weren’t there when we used it, and that it would not uninstall the Rhapsody part of Realplayer. Again, we didn’t notice that because we haven’t uninstalled it yet. It works perfectly.

Once you download and install Realplayer, you’ll be asked to install the browser plug-ins. These are the things that let you download just about ANY video that is playing in your browser. We use Chrome but we also tested the download feature in Explorer and both work equally well.

Head over to Youtube or some other video site and start any video. You should see a little ‘Download This Video’ as shown here:

If you don’t see the button, run your cursor (mouse) over the top right corner of the video and the ‘Download This Video’ menu should appear. RealPlayer will even tell you if it can’t download the video. Isn’t that handy?

After you click the download link, Realplayer will start to save the video on your computer. Don’t close the browser window until Realplayer has finished. Depending on your Internet connection, you may not have to wait for the video to play completely. In other words, the video will sometimes feed faster than it plays which will allow Realplayer to finish the download before the video is finished playing in your browser. This happens with Youtube more often than some other sites but Realplayer will work on just about every site that has streaming video on it. Because of DRM restrictions, not all sites will work with Realplayer but we found that most do.

Thanks for reading!