Anything that has something in common with VLC player is OK by me and SmoothTube uses the same codec libraries as Videolan's VLC player so I knew it was going to be a pretty effective application. The developers claim that it works as a front-end program to VLC's transcoding options, requiring no knowledge of their syntax or inner workings. However, if you're not a VLC Player fan, the good news is that you don't need VLC player installed to use SmoothTube.

That said, Visual Basic 6 and a full installation of VLC are required to build the source both of which are available on the developer site. In a nutshell, SmoothTube downloads videos from the Internet in the quality of your choosing - high, medium or low. All videos are stored automatically in the "My Videos" folder and are saved in MPEG format since this is recognised by the widest number of media players. One other nice little feature is that it is also able to smooth out some of the compression problems associated with downloaded videos which increases the quality of the download considerably.

This is a simple tool that gives you the unique option of choosing in what quality you want to download a clip. It's just a shame that it does not save in other formats too.