Every step, shown before you click it.

Nine short animations that walk through VidHatch end to end — from pinning the icon to leaving a batch running overnight. Nothing to sit through: each one plays when you reach it and replays whenever you want.

The basics

Everything in this section works on the free tier — unlimited, at full quality, with no watermark.

01

Pin VidHatch to your toolbar

Browsers hide freshly installed extensions behind the puzzle piece at the end of the address bar. Open it, find VidHatch in the list, and click the pin so the icon stays where you can see it.

Every other step in this guide starts from that icon, so this is worth the ten seconds.

Firefox has the same jigsaw button in the same corner, and the pin behaves identically.
02

The icon tells you when there is something to take

You never press scan. VidHatch reads the page as it loads, and the moment it recognises a video, image or GIF the icon wakes up with a count on it.

A quiet, grey icon is information too: it means the page really is empty, not that the extension is asleep.

It reads the stream itself, not a list of approved sites — so it keeps working when a site changes its player.
03

Pick the exact file, not a mystery download

Each video gets one row. Its menu lists every quality with its real size, so you are choosing a file rather than gambling on something called video(3).mp4. The same menu saves just the sound as MP3 or M4A, or just the subtitles.

Press download and it starts straight away, with real progress against real bytes. When the video has subtitles in your browser's language or English, they are saved next to it with the same name. Pause, resume or cancel from the same row.

On a page with a video, its thumbnails and page images fold behind Show N images, so the list stays about the video. The Images filter still shows them all.
04

Split streams come back as one file

HLS, DASH and Reddit send picture and sound down separate pipes. Most tools hand you both and wish you luck.

VidHatch stitches them together while the bytes arrive, so what lands in your Downloads folder is a single MP4 that plays anywhere. The merge happens inside your browser — the file never passes through our servers.

Pro: batch, watching and naming

Pro

Same extension, same download engine. These four panels open once a licence is active — the free tier stays unlimited for one-at-a-time grabbing.

05

Unlock Pro with your key

Your licence key arrives by email the moment checkout clears. Paste it into the field at the foot of the popup — or on the batch page, which offers the same box — and press Activate.

The check runs against a signature built into the extension, on your own machine. There is no licence server to call, so it works offline and there is nothing phoning home.

The email also carries a one-click link and a 6-digit code for vidhatch.com/activate, if you would rather not handle the key at all. Lost it? Lost your key? under the same box mails it back.
06

Sweep a whole list of pages at once

Paste page addresses one per line, choose what to Grab — videos, images or both — and press Scan pages. VidHatch opens each page in the background, the way you would, and puts what it finds in the table below.

On a list page, such as a channel, a category or search results, Open each post visits every post and keeps only its main video, or its full-size images. Previews, thumbnails and ads stay behind. It is slower, and it gets the real files.

07

Start the queue and walk away

Parallel sets how many downloads run at the same time, anywhere from 1 to 8. The rest wait their turn and start the moment a slot frees up.

Three is a sensible default. Merged streams hold data in memory while they stitch, so a very high number on very large videos is slower, not faster — raise it to get through many files, not one huge one.

08

Let VidHatch watch a page for you

Give it a page, what to grab and how often. On every check VidHatch opens the posts it has not seen yet, one at a time, and saves only their main video or full-size images.

Check now runs a check straight away. While it runs, every file shows up with its title, quality, length, size and progress, and Stop check ends it at once. Posts it did not reach are picked up next time.

It runs only while the browser is open, never more often than every 30 minutes, and opens up to 15 new posts per check.
09

Decide the names and the folder before you start

Preferred quality pre-selects a rung on the ladder. Ask for 1080p and you get the closest rung at or just above it — never a surprise 4K file, and never a blurry one when a better copy was sitting right there.

Save to subfolder keeps a job out of the rest of your Downloads, and Smart file names takes the page title instead of the site name. Subtitles with videos saves them as SRT, VTT, or not at all. Set these once and every download obeys them.

Now do it for real.

The basics are free and unlimited. Pro is there the day one video at a time stops being enough.

Need one task done? Read the step-by-step how-to guides.