VidLoader user guide

Getting started

VidLoader runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The free plan needs no account — install it and start downloading.

1. 1

   Go to the Download page and get the installer for your system (Windows .exe, macOS .dmg, or Linux .deb/.rpm/.AppImage).

2. 2

   Run the installer and open VidLoader. On first launch the app fetches its up-to-date download engine automatically.

3. 3

   Pick your language and color theme any time with the switchers at the bottom of the sidebar — 11 languages and 5 themes are included.

Downloading videos and audio

Save a video or its audio from YouTube, TikTok, and virtually any video site.

1. 1

   Copy the link of the video, playlist, or channel in your browser.

2. 2

   In VidLoader, open the Add tab and paste the link — a link you just copied fills in automatically. Press Preview link to see the title, thumbnail, duration, and description.

3. 3

   Choose MP4 (video) or MP3 (audio) and the quality — Optimal, 1080p, 720p, or 480p on the free plan; 2K, 4K, and 8K with Plus.

4. 4

   Press Download. The queue shows live progress and time remaining; you can pause, resume, cancel, or retry any item.

Your library (Clips)

Everything you download lands in your private, searchable local library.

1. 1

   Open the Clips tab to browse, search, and play your downloads.

2. 2

   Organize with groups: create folders, drag clips in, pin favorites, rename anything, or let auto-grouping sort clips by channel.

3. 3

   Select multiple clips for bulk actions — move, delete (optionally deleting the files on disk), or export.

The built-in player

Play anything you downloaded without leaving the app.

1. 1

   Click a clip to play it. Use the queue controls for previous/next, looping, and continuous playback of a group.

2. 2

   Subtitles: download them in your language from the clip's menu, then toggle CC in the player. Embedded and sidecar tracks both work.

3. 3

   360° videos: drag to look around and scroll to zoom. On a phone paired via "Watch on phone or TV", use the gyroscope.

Browser extension

The extension puts a download button right on the video page and sends the job to the desktop app — including the site cookies that members-only videos need.

Getting the extension

1. 1

   Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera: install it from your browser's extension store — links are on the Download page — or download the extension file from there.

2. 2

   The desktop app can also help: open Settings → Browser extension and choose your browser; VidLoader opens the right store page (or extensions page for a manual install) for you.

Safari (manual install)

1. 1

   Safari extensions must be enabled through Safari itself: download the Safari package from the Download page, open it, then enable VidLoader in Safari → Settings → Extensions.

2. 2

   If Safari warns about an unsigned extension, allow it in Safari's Develop menu (enable the Develop menu in Safari → Settings → Advanced first).

Using it

1. 1

   Open any video page and click the VidLoader button. Pick MP4 or MP3 and the quality in the popup — the download starts in the desktop app.

2. 2

   With Plus you can also start monitoring the current channel, playlist, user, or hashtag straight from the popup.

Auto-monitoring & alerts (Plus)

VidLoader watches channels, playlists, users, and hashtags for you and downloads new videos automatically.

1. 1

   Open the Monitor tab, press Add source, and paste the channel, playlist, user, or hashtag link (or start monitoring from the extension popup on that page).

2. 2

   Pick the check schedule and the format/quality new videos should download in.

3. 3

   Turn on discovery alerts in Settings: desktop notifications, sound, your own SMTP email, a Telegram bot, or a Discord webhook. Every channel has a test button, and each monitored link can be muted individually.

AI tools (Plus)

Turn downloaded videos into text and make your whole library searchable.

• •AI Transcriber — create an accurate, saved transcript of any downloaded video.
• •AI Summarizer — get a concise summary of any video.
• •AI blog writer — auto-generate a blog post and cover image from a video.
• •AI Auto-search — search your library by spoken keyword and jump to the exact moment it was said.

Video tools (Plus)

Small edits without leaving the app — each tool works on any downloaded clip.

• •Trim — cut a clip down to just the section you want.
• •GIF maker — turn a moment into an animated GIF.
• •Ringtone maker — export a short audio snippet as a ringtone.
• •More quality control — choose MP3 bitrate, pick dubbed audio tracks in your language, and upgrade a clip to a higher quality later.

A VidLoader Plus feature

Watch your clips on your phone or TV

Turn your computer into your own private streaming service. Any phone, tablet, or smart TV on your Wi-Fi can browse your clip library and play anything in it — while every file stays on your computer.

How it works

Each device pairs once — after that it reconnects automatically. You can see and remove paired devices at any time from Settings.

What paired devices can do

Your clips stream directly from your computer to your device over your own network. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — vidloader.com never sees your library, and no cloud service holds copies of your files.

Only devices you pair with a code can connect, and you can revoke any device with one click. When the feature is off, nothing is shared at all.

Watching on the go works too — the trick is to connect your phone to your home network first. These trusted, free tools do exactly that. Your computer just needs to stay on at home.

These are independent third-party tools configured on your own equipment. VidLoader is not involved in the connection and never relays your videos.

AI assistants (Plus)

VidLoader includes a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, so AI assistants such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor can operate VidLoader for you. It listens only on your own computer — nothing is opened to your network or the internet.

• •Open Settings → AI assistants (MCP) and turn it on. VidLoader shows the server address and creates a private access token.
• •Pick your assistant (Claude Desktop, Claude Code or Cursor) and copy the ready-made configuration snippet — it already contains the address and token.
• •Paste it where your assistant expects MCP servers (for Claude Desktop: claude_desktop_config.json, then restart the app; Claude Desktop needs Node.js installed).
• •Ask in plain language: “Download this video as MP3”, “What's in my queue?”, “Summarize the last clip I downloaded” or “Monitor this channel and alert me”.

What assistants can do

• •Inspect a link before downloading (title, length, available qualities and languages, whether you already have it), add one or many downloads at once (up to 25 links per request), schedule items for a set time, pause, resume, cancel, retry, remove or move items to the front of the queue — one at a time or all at once (pause all, resume all, cancel all, retry every failed item) — and see the live queue with progress, speed and time remaining.
• •Choose the same options you would in the app for each download: video or MP3, quality, subtitle language, dubbed-audio language, SponsorBlock (mark or skip sponsored segments), chapters (embed or split into separate files) and a start/end time to save just one section — for example “download minutes 2 to 5 of this video as MP3 with Spanish subtitles”.
• •Search your library with filters (creator, platform, collection, date, length, has transcript / summary), read a clip's details, captions, AI transcript and AI summary, organize clips into collections and creator groups, rename clips, and get a storage report: free space, library size, largest clips, missing files and likely duplicates — counts and sizes only.
• •List monitored sources with their health and last check, add new ones with the same per-source settings (check interval, quality, format, languages, whether to grab existing videos), edit, pause, check right now, mute or unmute their new-upload alerts, and remove them — removal always previews the source first and needs a second, confirmed request. An assistant can also wait for a clip to finish downloading or processing before acting on it, and check the app's status.
• •Search every transcript and caption file in your library at once for a word or phrase (results come back with the clip, timestamp and a short snippet), see which AI outputs a clip already has, and run the Plus AI tools — transcript, summary, subtitles, blog post or spoken summary — on a saved clip, then poll the job until it finishes. This uses the AI service and language you configured in the app; assistants cannot change those settings.
• •Run the app's own media tools on a saved clip: trim a section to a new file in your Downloads folder, make an animated GIF (up to 60 seconds) next to the clip, export a ringtone set, or convert the clip into a widely playable file — exactly what the Convert button does, so it replaces the original file in place (the only tool that changes an existing file). Each run is a job the assistant can poll; one job per clip at a time. A conversion can be cancelled at any point and leaves no temporary files behind, while trim, GIF and ringtone exports can only be cancelled before they start (they finish within moments).
• •That is the whole list. Assistants never see file paths, your license or account details, and cannot delete any files on your computer: removing a queue item or a monitored source only drops the entry, and every saved clip stays exactly where it is.
• •Read-only mode (Settings → AI assistants) lets an assistant look things up — queue, library, collections, transcripts and summaries, monitored sources, storage report, job status, app status and link details — without being able to add, change or remove anything.

Settings worth knowing

• •Download speed limiter — cap download speed (down to 500 KB/s) so downloads never hog your connection.
• •Proxies — add up to 6 rotating HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5 proxies, each with a connectivity test.
• •Cookie import — paste cookies for members-only or region-locked sites; they stay on your device.
• •Scheduled & off-peak downloads (Plus) — queue items to start at a set time or only during off-peak hours.
• •Output templates (Plus) — decide how new downloads are named and where they land inside your download folder. A template is a path such as {site}/{uploader}/{date} {title}: the parts before the last / become subfolders and the last part names the file; end with / to create folders only and keep default file names. Tokens: {site}, {title}, {date} (upload date as YYYY-MM-DD), {uploader}, plus {source} (the monitored link's name) in per-link templates. Empty or unknown tokens simply drop out, illegal characters are cleaned automatically, and files already on disk are never moved or renamed.
• •Tray & startup — keep VidLoader running in the system tray and optionally launch it at startup so the extension and monitoring always work.
• •Smart presets (Plus) — save your favorite mix of format, quality and options and apply it to new downloads with one click.
• •Sponsor skipping & chapters (Plus) — cut sponsored segments out of downloads automatically and split long videos by their chapters.
• •Audio polish (Plus) — embed cover art and title tags, normalize loudness across tracks, and pick your preferred dubbed audio language.
• •Automatic AI processing (Plus) — generate subtitles, transcripts, summaries or blog drafts the moment a download finishes.
• •Media server & devices (Plus) — stream your library to phones, TVs and other devices on your network straight from the app.
• •Faster, tougher downloads (Plus) — multi-connection acceleration plus automatic retries when a download stumbles.
• •Backups (Plus) — export your library to a single file, or let auto-backup save everything (clips, groups, settings, monitored links and playback positions) on a schedule; restore it on a fresh install.
• •Live stream recording (Plus) — record live streams as they air, and choose whether recordings start from the very beginning or the current moment.
• •Discovery alerts (Plus) — desktop notifications, a chime, or emails through your own mail server whenever a monitored link finds new media; alerts are sent straight from your computer.
• •Clipboard watching — copy a video link anywhere and VidLoader offers to download it right away.
• •Media export (Plus) — copy a group's clips, with their subtitles, thumbnails and AI files, into a tidy folder in your Downloads.