VidSwipe Lite

Self-contained video grabber. Finds media on page, shows thumbnails, saves to Downloads; right-click any video to grab directly

Save the video you're actually looking at, in one click. VidSwipe Lite watches a page's network traffic and finds the real media files behind the player; including ones no "download" button is offered for. Open the popup and every clip it found is listed with a thumbnail decoded from the file itself, so you can see exactly what you're about to save before you save it. Everything happens locally in your browser. No account, no sign-up, no uploading your links to someone else's server. WHAT IT DOES • Finds media automatically; watches the page for .mp4, .webm, .m3u8 and other media as it loads, so it works on players that hide their source behind blob:/MediaSource. • Real thumbnails; each result previews an actual frame from that exact file, not a guess scraped from the page. What you see is what gets saved. • One-click save ; straight to your Downloads folder. • Right-click any video; "Download with VidSwipe" appears on videos even when the player wraps them in overlay controls, which is where most right-click grabbers quietly fail to show up at all. • Facebook & Instagram clips keep their audio; these sites deliver video and sound as two separate files. VidSwipe Lite detects both halves, matches them to the same clip, and combines them into a single file with audio. No re-encoding, no quality loss, no extra software. • Full HLS streams; for .m3u8 streams it fetches every segment, decrypts AES-128 where needed, and stitches them into one playable file. • No duplicate clutter; when a site offers the same clip at several qualities, only the best one is listed. • Optional desktop companion (Currently Available for Linux); if the VidSwipe desktop app is running, a "Send to app" button hands the page over to it for full yt-dlp coverage. HONEST LIMITATIONS • YouTube streams are ciphered and cannot be saved by any extension running in the browser. The popup tells you so rather than failing silently. Use the desktop app. • Files from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X are fragmented MP4. They play fine in Chrome, VLC, and most players, but Apple's QuickTime Player has never supported that format. Use VLC, or the desktop app, if you need a QuickTime-compatible file. • This tool is for downloading videos you have the right to download. Please respect copyright and each site's terms of service. PERMISSIONS, AND WHY • webRequest / host access; to see the media URLs a page requests. This is the core of how the extension finds video at all. Nothing is logged or transmitted. • downloads; to save the file you clicked. • storage; remembers what was found on a tab, so the list survives reopening the popup. • contextMenus / tabs / scripting / activeTab; the right-click item, and reading the current page for media the network watcher missed. No analytics. No tracking. No remote server. The extension sends nothing to us on its own. The one time it contacts us is when you press "Found a bug? Submit it", and even then the details are handed to the report page in the part of the address after the "#" which browsers never transmit to a server. They are shown to you on the page, and nothing leaves your browser unless you read them and press Send. One exception worth naming plainly: on a YouTube page the popup fetches that video's thumbnail from Google's own image server so it can show you a preview. That tells Google the video id, exactly as opening the page already does. It goes to Google, not to us, and nothing else is sent. WHAT'S NEW Version 2.4.0 • Added: "Found a bug? Submit it" at the bottom of the popup. It opens a report form with the extension version, your browser, the page address and a summary of what was detected already filled in; the details that make a bug fixable rather than a guess. Everything is shown to you first and every field is editable, and none of it is transmitted until you press Send. • Added: "Like this extension? Leave a review" alongside it, which opens the Web Store review page directly. • Fixed: HLS streams that list their qualities separately could offer you an individual quality instead of the full stream, and those individual entries carry no sound. The popup now recognizes the full stream and hides the partial ones, so the entry you pick is the one that downloads with audio. • Added: on the rare stream where only a partial entry is available, the saved file is labelled "video only; no audio track" rather than arriving silent with no explanation. Version 2.3.1 • Fixed: videos from most professional video platforms saved without any sound. An HLS stream usually lists its picture and its sound as two separate tracks; the video track genuinely contains no audio at all, so saving the best-quality video on its own produced a silent file. VidSwipe Lite now reads the stream's audio tracks, fetches the one that belongs to the quality you're saving, and combines them into a single file. This affects a large share of retail, news and broadcaster sites, not just one or two. • Added: support for combining MPEG-TS streams. Version 2.2.0 could only join the fragmented-MP4 format used by Facebook and Instagram; MPEG-TS is what most other video platforms deliver, and it needed different handling. Both are now supported. • Fixed: when a stream offers several audio tracks, the one the stream itself marks as default for your chosen video quality is now used, rather than whichever happened to be listed first. • Changed: progress is now reported separately while the picture and the sound are fetched, so a long download no longer looks stalled partway through. • Unchanged, and worth saying: audio is copied across exactly as the site sent it. There is no re-encoding at any point, so nothing is lost combining the two halves. Version 2.2.0 • Fixed: Facebook and Instagram videos saved without any sound. These sites serve DASH, where the video file genuinely contains no audio track and the sound is a separate file — so saving the video alone produced a silent clip. VidSwipe Lite now identifies both halves, pairs them by the asset id they share, and merges them into one file with audio. Verified to produce output identical to a full ffmpeg merge. • Fixed: right-clicking a Facebook or Instagram video could grab the audio-only stream and save a file with no picture, depending on which request happened to arrive last. It now always resolves to the video and brings the matching audio with it. • Added: each result is now labelled "video + audio", "audio only", or "video only; no audio found yet", so a silent download can never come as a surprise. • Changed: the audio half of a split stream is no longer offered as its own download; its video entry already includes it. • Fixed: a clip's audio track could be mistaken for a duplicate of its video track and hidden from the list, because the two have identical durations by definition. • Progress is now shown while a combined download is fetched and assembled.