VII

If you're interested in a fast and simple method for downloading videos and music from YouTube, you can check out VII. It's a straightforward tool made with the Electron framework, which provides you with only the basic options for downloading YouTube clips and saving them as MP4 or FLV videos, depending on your preference. It can also extract the audio stream to create MP3 files, which comes in handy when you're looking to put together music collections.

Once the setup procedure is over, you can check out the simple interface of VII, where there are only a handful of options visible. All you have to do is type or paste the YouTube link, select the preferred output format from MP3, FLV and MP4, then click the "Download" button and wait for the task to be over. During this time, you can check out a progress bar.

There's no option integrated for specifying the output directory because all YouTube content is automatically saved in the unzipped folder of VII (resources\app\downloads). Unfortunately, the developer doesn't indicate this in any way in the main window, so you might be left browsing your computer for the converted file.

Batch processing isn't possible by creating a queue of YouTube links, which means that only one video can be downloaded and encoded at a time. Also, advanced users interested in configuring audio and video properties for the new tracks aren't lucky either since VII performs rapid conversions while preserving the audio and video parameters of the original YouTube clips and doesn't give you the possibility to change these settings.

On the bright side, the downloading and conversion jobs are performed rapidly, and the audio and video quality turned out to be pretty good. It may not be feature-rich, but VII offers a simple and straightforward solution for downloading and encoding YouTube clips to MP3, MP4 or FLV.