Our IDM Review Reveals Good Bang for your Buck
IDM does exactly what its name suggests: helps you manage your Internet downloads. It replaces your web browser’s download function and springs into action whenever you select a download link to an item or IDM detects streaming video or audio to “grab”.
Faster Downloading
Why replace your web browser’s download function with IDM? Well, for starters, IDM downloads items much faster, lightning fast. Your web browser will download items in a single stream, whereas IDM will download an item in multiple streams, essentially splitting the item into different chunks and downloading them simultaneously rather than downloading the item all in one go, maximizing your downloading speeds in the process. Any incomplete, interrupted or otherwise disrupted download attempts will be automatically retried until IDM has downloaded the entire items in full.
IDM also lets you queue downloads, allowing you to choose which items to download immediately (as usual) or to download later, for example overnight when you sleep. This ability to queue downloads is especially handy for large downloads or when downloading dozens of items from a single web page or website (see below).
IDM works across all web browser apps, providing a feature-rich one step solution even if you use different browsers. For example, maybe you follow some of the techniques in my book and use Chrome for your regular day-to-day browsing and Firefox or Opera for your sensitive web browsing activities, or vice versa.
Impressive Website Copier and Mass Download Capabilities
IDM comes with an awesome website copier and mass download feature. Through an easy wizard interface, IDM lets you download entire websites, parts of websites, or specified item types (videos, images, apps, documents, or user-defined items) from a website or parts of it. You can also queue any mass downloading jobs you set up, scheduling the downloads for later, for example, while you sleep.
If you are tired of individually selecting dozens of items one at a time to download them to your device, IDM’s ripping feature makes short work of this. Enter your target website and select the link depth you want to download (1 for all the downloads on the current page, 2 for all the downloads on the current page plus all those on any linked pages etc.). Then select the item types you are interested in (all, videos, images, apps, documents, some of the above or create your own custom user-defined category). That’s it!
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IDM will ask if you first want to see a list of what the inventory of downloads will look like or you can decide to download, or queue, right away. Previewing a list first is handy because sometimes your selections might mean you are primed to download hundreds of items or more.
On my wish list for IDM is that it would leave behind less trace data on your computer about what you downloaded, so make sure that you cover your tracks after using a trace data cleaning app afterwards.
Video Grabber
IDM’s video capture, a feature sometimes called a YouTube video grabber, is the best in the business. IDM enables you to download videos and audio embedded in webpages that you would otherwise not be able to download.
As you probably already know, you cannot download embedded content the same way as images and some other content which you can download by selecting or by right-clicking and downloading. You need an app like IDM to help you.
Whenever IDM detects streaming content (for example, when you play a video on YouTube), a small icon will appear on your display giving you the option to download the video. If you want to save the video to your computer, simply click on the icon and IDM will download it right away or queue it for later, as you wish. If you don’t want to download the content, just ignore the icon or close it (anyway, it’s tiny and not in the way). If the streaming video or audio is large, for example a full-length documentary, just tell IDM to queue downloading it for later, perhaps when your computer is idle.
Once you start using IDM to save streaming content such as videos, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
There are some free video grabber apps and extensions out there, but IDM is religious about keeping up to date so that it seamlessly works with supported web browsers and is in step with technology measures constantly being employed by content hosting websites to try blocking the capture of embedded and streaming video/audio.
Conclusion
IDM’s video grabber function coupled with its fast download enhancing speeds and website copying features described above, leads this Internet Download Manager review to conclude that purchasing IDM is money well spent.
Try IDM free for 30 days and judge for yourself.