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.
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.
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.
Pick the exact file, not a mystery download
Every row states its resolution, its container and its size, so you are choosing a file rather than gambling on something called video(3).mp4.
Click a row and it starts straight away. The line under the row is real progress against real bytes — the number counts up to the size the row promised.
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
ProSame extension, same download engine. These four panels open once a licence is active — the free tier stays unlimited for one-at-a-time grabbing.
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.
Sweep a whole list of pages at once
Paste page URLs one per line and press Scan pages. VidHatch fetches each one, reads its media, and drops everything it finds into the table below as separate rows you can sort and cull.
Tick Deep scan for sites that build their player with script. It opens each page properly instead of just fetching the HTML, which is slower but catches HLS and DASH streams a plain fetch would never see.
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.
Let VidHatch watch a page for you
Give it a page and an interval. VidHatch re-reads that page on schedule, compares what it sees against what it has already taken, and downloads only the new material.
Check now runs the same pass immediately, which is the honest way to test a rule before trusting it overnight.
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. 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.