A browser extension·keeps video, tells no one
The river takes the videos you love.
Cupped hands, one download,
they come home with you.
Nothing online intends to stay. Links rot, and the thing you watched last spring is, by autumn, a 404 and an apology.
Stasha notices the video already playing and keeps it: one whole file, at the quality it was sent, assembled on your own machine. No account, no server, no one told.
It lands on your own disk, under your own roof — or, switched on by you, straight into your Google Drive, your Dropbox, even a quiet server all your own.
花は散る
01 What it is for
What would you keep?
None of it was promised to you. All of it is one broken link from gone.
The lecture that rearranged how you think. Your daughter's recital, the year she was seven. The recipe you've cooked forty times, the interview no one will get again, the song your father liked. You began your own list two lines in — everyone does. Stasha keeps it: each one a whole file, saved to your own disk or straight into your Google Drive, your Dropbox, a server of your own — yours to open in ten years, on a computer that doesn't exist yet.
And the keeping happens closer to home than you'd think.
02 How it behaves
Everything happens on your machine.
The work stays home. A streamed video arrives however a site cares to send it: in hundreds of pieces, picture apart from sound, sometimes wrapped in ordinary transport encryption. Stasha gathers it, undoes the wrapping, and joins it into one clean file — never re-encoded, every frame exactly as it was sent. All of it inside your browser. Nothing is sent away to be worked on, because there is no away — we never built a server.
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One clean file
Hundreds of pieces go in; one ordinary file comes out, and any player will open it. A plain file served whole is kept byte for byte. Where a playlist offers several qualities, the choice is yours — shown, not made for you.
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Saved where you say
Your own disk, first and by default. Or — switched on by you, never for you — straight into your Google Drive, your Dropbox, or a server that answers only to you. The keys to all three stay in your browser.
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Any length
Pieces are assembled on disk, not piled up in memory, so length costs nothing: a three-hour lecture downloads as calmly as a three-minute song, and a multi-gigabyte file is simply a file.
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No account
None with us, ever — no email, no password, no cheerful invitation to sign in to continue.
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No companion app
Nothing to install beside it, and nothing running when your browser isn’t.
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No telemetry
Its only requests are to the video you chose and — if you switch them on — to the destinations above. Nobody is told about either.
The last three promises are cheap — every extension makes them. What follows is the part that costs us something.
03 What it refuses
What it will not do
A downloader is defined, rather more than most software, by what it declines to do. What follows is not a statement of good intentions. It is in the code, and it is covered by tests.
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Video that is locked
Some video is protected, deliberately, by people entirely within their rights to protect it. Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay and SAMPLE-AES are recognised and declined — while reading the stream, in the interface, and once more before anything begins. Stasha carries no means of opening them and makes no attempt to acquire any.
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YouTube
Not supported, and blocked outright in the editions that go to the Chrome and Edge stores. Their rules forbid it and YouTube’s own terms forbid it, and we would sooner say so plainly than be coy about it.
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Anything about you
No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reports, no little pings home to announce a version number. Stasha does not watch what you keep — your afternoon’s viewing is nobody’s business but yours. Should you prefer evidence to assurances — and you should — open your browser’s network inspector while it works. You will find us conspicuously absent.
Refusing all of this loses us users. We would rather have the reputation.
04 How to get it
Take it home.
First edition, in preparation.
Each store in its own good time; the listings will appear here as they let it through. The Chrome edition also covers Brave, Vivaldi, Arc and the rest of the Chromium family. Firefox gets a genuine port rather than a polite shim.
If you are the sort of person who likes to know how a thing actually works — and some of us can't help it — there is a longer account of how it works, with diagrams: the tour most software hopes nobody asks to take.