VGrab1. Reload any page you opened before installing
The extension finds video by watching what a page requests. If the page was already open when you installed, those requests happened before the extension existed and it never saw them. Reload the page and it will.
The first minutes after installing are where this bites: every tab you already have open needs one reload.
2. Press play first, then click the icon
Many sites don't fetch the playlist until you press play. Before that, the page genuinely hasn't asked for anything, so there is nothing to find.
Press play, let it run a few seconds, then click the extension icon. A number on the icon means it found something.
3. Use "Refresh and look again" in the popup
Some players wait a while before fetching the next piece, or only fetch a new playlist after you change quality. The popup has a button that walks the page again — click it and give it a few seconds.
4. Still nothing? Record it
Two situations no amount of reloading will fix:
- The player never hands over an address. Data is fed to it in chunks by script, and no fetchable address exists on the page at all.
- It's a live stream. There is no complete file — it's being made as it's being watched.
Both are what Record is for. It saves what the player is actually playing, picture and sound
together, as an ordinary .mp4. The page has to stay open and playing while it records,
and recording takes as long as the video runs. There's no way around that part.
It downloads, but slowly
First question: does the video stutter when you simply watch it? Then it won't download fast either — the speed is whatever bandwidth the site gives you, and no extension changes that.
VGrab fetches each video in 3 parts at once by default. You can raise it in Settings, but higher is not reliably faster: it gets you throttled sooner, and once throttled you end up slower than 3. Leave it alone. Same reasoning for downloading several videos at once — the setting defaults to 1 because one at a time is the most reliable.
And try not to play the video while it downloads; playback is competing for the same bandwidth.
The file has picture but no sound
Some sites load picture and sound as two separate tracks. When the extension finds both it merges them. If you only get one, Record is the quick way out — it captures what the player is putting out, which is both.
Tried all of it
Reload the video page and check that only one copy of the extension is enabled — that accounts for most of the strange cases. If it persists, click "Copy feedback" in the extension and paste it on the feedback page. It contains the extension version, the browser version, the video page's address with the query string stripped (tokens usually live there), the host and path tail of each address found, and the error. No cookies, no full tokenised addresses. Read it before you send it.