VGrab
VGrabWhere the time goes
Each part of a stream is a few seconds long and a film has thousands of them. Fetching them one after another means a round trip to the server for every part — most of the time is spent waiting, not transferring.
What VGrab does
It fetches several parts at once (three by default, adjustable in settings). Whichever arrives first is written first, but the order in the file is always right — parts are written into one file in sequence as they come, not piled up and merged later, so memory stays flat even with thousands of parts. An hour-long video is done in minutes.
Some sites throttle or briefly refuse clients that ask too eagerly. When VGrab hits a rate limit it slows down and backs off before trying again — it never pushes, and you never end up on a site's blocklist because of it.
How to use it
- Nothing to set — Save already fetches several parts at once.
- To change the number: Settings → parallel downloads.
Questions
Do more lanes mean faster? Only up to a point — the site is the bottleneck, and asking too eagerly gets you throttled. Three is the setting that proved stable in testing.
How much memory does a download use? Parts go straight to disk; only the few in flight are in memory. Multi-gigabyte files are no different.
Other features
- Auto-selects the videoHow does it save the actual video in one click?
- Streaming video downloadHow do stream segments become one playable MP4?
- Section downloadCan I download just twenty minutes of a video?
- Live recordingCan I record a live stream while watching it?
- Resumable downloadWi-Fi dropped halfway — can the download resume?