YouTube has long be a great time waster no matter where your general interests lie but if I’m being honest, it wasn’t until the last few years that I felt any of the content was worth saving after the initial viewing. Things have certainly changed for me and perhaps it correlates with YouTube streaming high-definition content at resolutions up to 1080p. There is a ton of great content with amazing clarity and as the file size continues to increase it is within reason that one would want to save the stream locally to your hard drive for later re-viewings.

I use XBMC as my media center on my HDTV religiously – all my media is stored on a central server and exported to XBMC. One of the nice features of XBMC is the ability to stream movie trailers from YouTube or IMDB for any of the movies in your collection – without any configuration on your part. Unfortunately, as of now XBMC does not stream the 720p movie trailers that are often found out there. However, it can play the trailers from the local file system on the assumption they are titled correctly and reside in the same folder as the movie they depict. Thus I needed a way to download and save YouTube 720p trailers manually.

Youtube Downloader HD is a free Windows application that fits my need perfectly. Now, there are literally dozens of ways to save video streams from all the Internet content sites. There are lots of applications as well as browser plugins or clever javascript snippets but at the end of the day Youtube Downloader HD has to be the best. First, it’s a single executable and as such, is portable. The interface is just a single screen that provides all the necessary options in the fore-front. Usability is as simple as pasting the YouTube video URL into the application, selecting the video quality you wish to download, and the local folder with which to save it in. What more could you ask for?