Release notes

Fixed a class of streams that downloaded without sound; live saving now states the expected wait up front; after 100% every step shows live progress, and a real stall can be resumed where it stopped

Fixed

• Fixed: a class of HLS streams that carry video and audio separately used to download with video only and no sound. VGrab now reads the track table of the initialization segment to tell, and when a separate audio track exists it downloads both and merges them into one file with sound
• After the bar reaches 100%, every step (putting pieces together, merging into MP4, writing to disk) shows live progress; if a step makes no progress for several minutes, VGrab says which step is stuck, and Resume continues right from that step; what is already downloaded stays
• Fixed: on narrow (phone-width) download pages, the action buttons no longer cover the video title

Improved

• When you start saving a live stream, the expected wait is stated up front: usually a dozen seconds, at most 45; if nothing arrives by then it stops and says so, and you can retry; once saving has really started, that limit no longer applies

This update tells you what changed, the popup can copy a video's original link, and you can choose where files are saved.

New

• After an update, a line appears at the top of the popup: "A new version is here: see what's new"; clicking it opens the release notes at this version's section. Close it when you're done; nothing pops up on its own, no nagging
• The release notes page is now grouped into New / Improved / Fixed, and every version has its own permanent link
• The popup can now copy a video's original link: a "Copy link" button sits at the end of the "Saves as" line, and at the same spot on the downloading screen
• The "Save to folder" setting is now a choice of three: Folder per site (default, same as before), Flat into Downloads (no subfolders), One fixed folder
• The manage page has a new About tab: the version number is right on the tab, and "All release notes" is one click to the website's full history

Fixed

• Users who installed from the ZIP package (not from the store) could see the welcome page again on every browser start; it now opens only once, at first install

An update shaped by user feedback: a new-user guide, multi-threaded downloading for whole-file videos too, and several site compatibility fixes.

New

• New-user guide: the page shown after the first install and the guide page on the official site now have a four-step mini animation (pin to the toolbar, play the video, click the icon when a number appears, click "Save this video"); the popup has a new "?" button at the top right that opens the guide anytime. Updates never replay it, so it won't nag
• Pages that serve the whole video as a single file now support multi-threaded downloading too: automatically fetched in parallel 4 MB parts, several times faster; when a site doesn't support partial requests, it falls back to the previous behavior

Fixed

• After switching to another video within a site (the kind of switch that doesn't reload the page), the suggested file name now follows the current video instead of sticking with the previous one
• Sites whose player is embedded in a frame used to be recognized but couldn't be downloaded; downloads now work
• Some sites don't request a playlist file and write the video address directly into the page; they are now recognized as soon as the page opens, no need to press play first
• On some sites the downloaded file name was getting shortened; it is now kept in full
• Fixed large files failing after passing 90%, and history entries occasionally going missing: every part's byte count is now verified and refetched automatically when short; after a successful save, the history entry is written before cleanup

Improved

• Tightened YouTube policy: videos on YouTube itself, and YouTube videos embedded in other pages, are not downloaded; for embeds the popup says clearly whose video it is and why we don't download it

Improved

• Feedback entry optimization: "Having trouble?" in the popup and manage page is renamed "Report a problem or a link", with a more noticeable button style, so when a video is missing or the wrong one is picked, you can spot where to report at a glance
• Uninstall feedback optimization: the page where the extension recently failed to find a video is filled into the feedback form after uninstall, ready to report directly; edit it or clear it with one click anytime, the user decides whether to send it

Fixed

• In response to user feedback, fixed "the saved video is not the episode you were watching": some sites serve the episode you are watching from cache while preloading neighboring episodes, so the wrong episode could be picked and saved; the right one is picked now

New

• In response to user feedback, more sites are now supported: some sites skip the manifest file and hand the stream list to the player through a JSON API; videos on those pages are now found and can be downloaded

Fixed

• On some sites, longer videos weren't recognized and couldn't be downloaded; that works now
• On right-to-left interfaces (like Arabic), dates in history no longer break into two pieces

Improved

• Two downloads run at the same time by default instead of one at a time (it was one before); adjustable from 1 to 5 in Settings
• The setting "Segments per video in parallel" is now "Download threads per video"; the Settings gear icon is easier to spot; and when a download is queued, the popup has a button straight to Settings
• The review prompt comes a bit earlier: it used to appear after 5 finished downloads, now after 3; it also appears once after a big download finishes
• The store short description now names the supported formats (M3U8, HLS, DASH, MP4), easier to find by format keywords

Fixed

• On the downloads page, the Expand button on the second parallel card and on queued cards works now
• Queued downloads no longer disappear after a Chrome restart
• Videos that were only saved as ts when disk space ran out can be re-downloaded as MP4 from the history
• Resuming an interrupted section download no longer runs all the way to the end of the video
• Even with paused or queued downloads in the list, disk space is released automatically
• On sites whose segments carry the whole video's timeline, section downloads now start playing at 0:00
• The background no longer piles up irrelevant error logs

The first version on the Chrome Web Store.

New

• Open a video page, click the extension icon, and it automatically finds the video playing — by format, not by site (M3U8/HLS streams, DASH, whole files)
• Save the whole video, or just the part you pick
• Record a live stream while it plays — from the earliest moment available until you stop
• Quality optional: 480P by default, or the closest available, with the one actually used shown
• When video and audio come over separate tracks, they're merged into one file with sound
• Resume after interruptions: continue from the download list after a pause; several at once queue automatically
• Progress, pause and resume on the downloads page; queue and history on the manager page
• No account, nothing uploaded, files stay on your computer
• YouTube and DRM-protected videos are not supported