MetaCafe Pro

Most video lovers don’t need any introduction for metacafe.com . It is one of the most popular community based video sharing site around. With hundreds of videos being added daily, it is hard for people to keep track of new videos. To help it’s users, MetaCafe released MetaCafe Pro. Don’t be mislead by the “Pro” prefix. This is an absolutely free software that can be downloaded from metacafe.com .

Usage of this software is quiet simple. Several arrows show up in different parts of the software to help you learn the interface. Anyway, there is not much to learn. After installation, and logging-in using a username and password (if you do not have a username at metacafe.com, you can create a new registration from the interface itself), it automatically starts downloading new contents as and when they are available.

New contents once downloaded, would be directly available in the “New Items” tab. Metacafe comes integrated with a video player, so you can start playing directly from the interface. This is really important because all online video sites use the new “Flash Video (FLV)” format, which is a less supported system on most systems and most major players do not support it by default. It also has a “TV mode” which plays all the newly arrived video sequentially in full screen mode. One fault I did find was that, when in “TV Mode”, it failed to show a seek bar. So you cannot rewind or forward when in “TV Mode”.

Once you find a video you like, you can click the “Save Item” button, which moves the video to the “Saved Items” tab. If you need, you can also save the flv file to a specific folder.

Content Settings

This option is available from the left section of the interface. From this dialog, you can select the types of Videos, Images or Games you would like to automatically get downloaded. There is also a section for “Family Filter” which helps in filtering out violence or explicit videos (nudity or very sexual).

Options

The options dialog box also has several extra options to allocate a specific disk space area. Metacafe will use this space to store automatically downloaded videos. You also have options to control various Traffic related settings here.