Real Player 11 can catch web videos on DVD

Last week, The Scoble Show had featured vice president of Real Networks, Jeff Chasen showing off the abilities of the new Real Player which has the abilities to download videos from thousands of sites like YouTube. Additional, you can even burn those downloaded videos in VCDS and DVDs and then view them on your DVD player.

This upcoming media player from Real is still weeks away from being publicly available, but I was lucky enough to get a reviewer’s invite to try it out (Thanks: Amit Agarwal).

With Real Player 11, downloading videos is just one click away. For instance, if you had to preserve your favorite YouTube video on your hard drive, just hover your mouse over video and you’ll notice the big “Download this Video” button. Clicking this button will download and add the video to your library, which can later be burned on DVD or VCD.

I’m not sure if the content providers (like YouTube) will like this, but for end users like me, it’s pretty awesome because you can effortlessly download videos and watch them on fullscreen. Downloading streaming videos otherwise involved greasemonkey script or Firefox extension along with flash player like FLV Player, which sounds too complex for an average user.

Besides YouTube, Real Player 11 can also download streaming videos from over 1000 different sites. They’ve also made notable changes to the user interface.

Screenshot:

(click to enlarge)

As Jeff said on Scoble Show, Real Player 11 will be available in free and pro editions. While the free version of Real Player 11 can download videos from different sites, it cannot burn them on disc.