Visit YouTube in your browser and it’s easy enough to search for and play any videos you like. Downloading individual clips and using them offline is a little more difficult, though – unless you get help from a third-party tool like YouTube Mate.

Launch the program and it’ll immediately begin monitoring your clipboard for YouTube URLs. If you find a video you’d like to save, just copy the address to the clipboard, and YouTube Mate will pop up a Download dialog. Click OK, choose the video format and resolution you’d like to save (there’s full HD support here) and watch as YouTube Mate downloads and saves it for you.

You have lots of clips to save? Not a problem. YouTube Mate can download multiple clips at the same time, just keep copying the URLs and deciding exactly which files and formats you’d like to grab.

Everything you download appears in a list on the program’s interface, and if you want to play a particular clip then just double-click it to view the movie in a simple video player.

Once your videos are downloaded then you can play or convert them in just a click or two

Or, if the downloaded files aren’t in a convenient format for you, YouTube Mate can quickly convert them to something more suitable.

First you’ll need to define your output format by selecting the appropriate Profile option. There are profiles for specific devices (iPad, iPod, iPhone, and many other phones, portable video players and other hardware), and a lot of more general format options: you can save clips as Flash (SWF)movies, audio files, DVD-friendly MPEG’s and others (and you can even customise these profiles to take fine control over the frame video, video sample rate, whatever you like).

Then select an Output folder, click Convert, and YouTube Mate will quickly convert each clip to your chosen format. We would rather it converted only the selected clips, actually – there doesn’t seem to be any way to convert a specific file, other than remove everything else from the list – but it’s still a useful option.

YouTube Mate does have one potential annoyance, in that you must provide the authors with your email address before you can activate the program. They promise they won’t share it (and we’ve no reason to believe otherwise), but it just makes us wary.

If that’s not an issue for you, though, the program provides a quick and easy way to download and manage YouTube clips, and there’s certainly far more functionality here than we’d expect from a free tool.