In three quick steps, I downloaded RealPlayer 11, accepted a license agreement and adjusted a few settings such as whether or not I wanted to use RealPlayer 11 by default for playing all videos on my PC. In the case of longer videos, downloading took more time, and I wished this RealPlayer made it possible to watch videos shortly after they started downloading, like Apple does with movies downloaded from its iTunes Store.ĭownloading this new RealPlayer was surprisingly painless - a welcome change compared with my experiences downloading the company's previous players. The company also says it is working on plans to make these saved videos transferable to portable players, including Apple's iPod, so that after downloading numerous videos, you need not be tied to your computer to watch them. I missed being able to use RealPlayer 11's video downloading on my Apple computers, but RealNetworks says it will make its player usable on Macs before the end of the year. Granted, not all the videos that one watches online are worth capturing, but it's nice to have the ability to save them with just a mouse click. Being able to copy videos made me realize how many clips I watch online, footage that might otherwise have been forgotten had I not saved it on my computer.

I tried RealPlayer 11 on my Windows XP desktop and on my Vista laptop, using both Internet Explorer 7.0 and Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 without problems.

How to use realplayer to capture video