MediaOpener

MediaOpener is a lightweight and portable piece of software that gives you the possibility to download video from various websites like YouTube, and save them on your computer. It also has features for optionally converting downloaded videos to GIF and for extracting the audio streams to create MP3 music.

Installation isn't required since you can double-click the downloaded .exe to reach the main app window right away. This means that you can save the tool to a USB flash drive and directly run it on any PC without setup or worrying that the registry entries will be affected. There are no software prerequisites either (such as .NET Framework).

The application doesn't put emphasis on appearance, preferring to focus on functionality instead. The interface consists of a single window that shows all options put at your disposal.

As soon as you paste a URL in the dedicated box, MediaOpener analyzes its contents. Three buttons are available for downloading the video with its original format and for converting it into GIF or audio automatically.

Before proceeding with the task, you can specify the start and end time if you wish to download only a particular part and not the whole video. As soon as the download is over, the utility offers to open the destination folder in Windows Explorer so you can inspect the new file.

We haven't encountered any compatibility issues with Windows 10 in our tests, and MediaOpener had minimal impact on the system's performance. However, it takes a very long time to analyze the video before downloading it, during which the application stops responding to commands.

On top of that, there are no options implemented for changing the default saving directory, for downloading playlists or multiple videos at the same time, for selecting the preferred video quality, or for configuring audio and video parameters for the output. All files are saved in the user folder.