While streaming seems to gain more popularity by the day, some users prefer to download content at times or always. This offers several benefits, such as:
- Access the content permanently, even if the video is deleted, modified, or blocked.
- Enjoy the video without ads or any other unwanted content.
- You do not need Internet to watch it.
- Watch the video in your favorite local player.
There are plenty of services available on the Internet that let you download videos to the local system. You may also use standalone programs, Internet Download Manager is my favorite, if you prefer using a desktop program.
I reviewed the video downloader Cobalt in June. Cobalt is a free service that is easy to use and comes without any ads or unwanted content. The developers have added plenty of features to it since that last review.
It now supports the following services at the time of writing: bilibili, blusky, dailymotion, facebook, instagram, look, ok, pinterest, reddit, rutube, snapchat, soundcloud, streamable, tiktok, tumbl, twitch, twitter (x), vine, vimeo, vk, and youtube.
Usage is still pretty straighforward: paste the URL of the video into the single form field on the Cobalt website and hit the check (>>) button afterwards. If things to well, you should get a download prompt right afterwards.
Tip: Cobalt collects anonymous traffic analytics “to get an approximate number of active cobalt users”. You can disable that under Settings > Privacy. There you also find an option to always tunnel files, which hides your IP and other information.
Cobalt Settings are extensive
The default video quality is set to 720p. You can open the settings to change that to anything between 8k+ and 144p.
For YouTube, you may also change the preferred codec from h264 to either av1 or vp9. There is also a beta option to enable hls for video & audio on YouTube.
Audio settings are also extensive. You may change the default audio format (mp3) to another (best, ogg, wav, or opus), the default audio bitrate from 128 kb/s to another (between 320 kb/s and 8 kb/s).
Again, there are some service specific settings available. For YouTube, you may set a preferred dub language. For TikTok, you may enable the downloading of original sound.
Filenames are set to be “pretty” by default. You may change that to classic, basic, or nerdy. There is also an option to disable the saving of file metadata, and to change the default saving method from download to ask, share, or copy.
Last but not least, you may enable custom instances, which need to be provided. This should give the service some breathing room when a site blocks the main download servers.
Closing Words
Cobalt is an easy to use downloader for video and audio content from more than a dozen of the most popular websites on today’s Internet. It is great for users who download videos occasionally, or have troubles downloading a specific video using another service or tool.
All in all, a great service that is well worth a bookmark.
I do use Cobalt to download videos from services it supports, its fast and flawless.
There is one video service it does not support which concerns perhaps more particularly European users, which is ARTE videos : for those I use an online tool called ‘Save TheVideo’ at https://www.savethevideo.com/downloader which does the job perfectly well.
tried a very long you tube video :
Cobalt give this message :
the media you requested is too long. current duration limit is 180 minutes.
Seen that Before with more web-based video-rip websites…
Anyway ..got the file with another- – software solution..
“fixed an issue that caused long youtube videos to get abruptly cut off. if you still experience this issue, try enabling the new hls option in settings!”