360 Youtube Downloader

Nowadays it’s a piece of cake to download videos directly from YouTube, and even convert music videos to audio formats so you can easily store and listen to them from any device. There are free websites that can do exactly that and even a few powerful programs that are also free.

360 Youtube Downloader can download YouTube videos, but it's neither free nor powerful. These are only two of the reasons why you might want to avoid it.

It's normally not worth writing about the limitations of a trial or demo version of a program, but 360 Youtube Downloader won’t let us enjoy any of its otherwise basic functions without constantly reminding us that we should buy the full version.

Not one but two nag screens appear as soon as you open the program and then, again and again, every 3 minutes or so. There is no way to click on any of the screens without at least one of them opening a page in your browser which takes you to a buy page. And this happens even if you don’t actively use the program, but just keep it open.

How do you download a video from YouTube? First, you copy the URL from the website, then you go to the main interface and… hmmm, it’s already there. If it automatically pastes the URL in the appropriate field, what does the “Paste URL” button do? Ohhhh, you have to press it to start the download.

This very unintuitive approach continues when you try to configure the program. From the settings, you can choose to convert a downloaded video automatically to either MP3 or AVI. But you can only make this choice once; after that, the “Auto Convert to” dropdown menu becomes unusable unless you restart the program. We don’t know if this is a bug or a limitation.

We would conclude that it's probably best to avoid this particular program. There are plenty of other free options out there that do an even better job, have none of these limitations and are much easier to use.