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My 10 rating certainly mean it's "perfect" -- what is, especially for $25? -- but reflects just what a GREAT job Tubedigger does for me for a one-time $25 investment. It makes my video-capture, convert and repair so much easier (and fun). It is a fairly straightforward yet extremely powerful downloading, converting, and repairing tool, especially for losslessly capturing streaming video (usually without having to let the stream play). But even though it's straightforward, unless you experiment with it, you are likely to underestimate just how powerful it is.
Of course it won't capture every stream that's out there, but it will losslessly capture way more than any other not-complex tool I've tried. Just keep refreshing, changing the browser setting, toggling (if necessary) between Download Mode and Record Mode (which is still lossless, but is realtime playing-stream capture), looking for hidden links, etc. etc. It may seem like I can't get anything to download from a given site, but then I keep tweaking/"goosing" it and re-trying -- and suddenly it's capturing like crazy. You can open multiple instances, so if, say, TD is occupied capturing a "record" stream (i.e., one that you have to let play through for [still-lossless] capture), you can open another instance to keep working on other downloads.
One thing I've learned is that I should search for (safe) sites that are actually using the same source stream that TD *can't* capture. E.g., for some time now I can no longer get Tubedigger to capture directly from Hulu no matter what I try, but I've found that I *am* often still able to capture what was clearly the same stream from some other sites, e.g. TVGuide.com. But even there, some retries, refreshes, experimenting with settings (including changing the built-in browser between IE and Chromium) may still be necessary before it starts capturing (even in cases where another downloader might never get you there no matter WHAT you try).
And the converter is just WONDERFUL for quickly (usually without transcoding) making a balky or fully non-playable captured stream play beautifully. E.g., I recently captued a .ts file that would balk and stop when I tried to play it. I saw that it was actually encoded H.264 instead of as the expected mpeg2 transport stream. Tried lossless converting/repairing with AVIDemux 2.5 and 2.6 with various settings, and it just kept giving me error messages, crashes, and unplayable files. So I went to the Tubedigger converter, input the .ts file (had to change the selection dropdown from the default "Media Files" to "All Files" for the .ts file to be selectable). Then I just selected to convert to "MP4 (no transcoding)" and in 30 seconds it outputted an mp4 that played perfectly. Often, ticking "fix flv" when using the converter -- especially when the input is (no surprise here) an flv stream (even if it was encoded with H.264) -- and then again, converting to "MP4 (no transcoding)" will provide FAST, quality mp4 output. Even when you do have to resort to re-rendering, it is one of the faster converters I've seen, and easy to use.
I just can't image not having Tubedigger, especially as someone who only "kinda sorta" understands video. At $25 it's really a bargain. Email support is *extremely* responsive, and the website FAQs are really helpful. |
