VK Video & Music Downloader Full review

VK Video & Music Downloader is a browser extension that only serves VK. In the Russian-speaking world VK is an all-round social platform, with video plus a fairly complete music library, and a lot of people use it as their music service.

What sets it apart is music support. VK's music and video run on two completely separate interfaces, and music has extra access restrictions on top. yt-dlp handles VK video well, but the music side needs extra setup; most general-purpose extensions do not do music at all.

It is free and can download playlists back to back, but it only covers one platform, VK. And like other niche single-platform extensions, you need to keep an eye on whether it is still maintained and whether the developer has changed hands.

Two parsers: one for video, one for music

Video goes through the stream manifest on the playback page; music goes through a separate audio interface, and the playback URLs it returns usually carry time-limited signatures and require a logged-in session. The extension handles both paths separately, and that is the extra work it does compared with general-purpose tools.

Why music requires a login

VK's music library has copyright and regional restrictions, so anonymous access basically cannot get playback URLs. The extension runs in the session you are logged in to, so it can get content you already have the right to play. That also means its ceiling is your account's permissions.

Downloading playlists back to back

A playlist's track list is sent by the interface all at once, and the extension loops over it to get each track's URL. Because the list comes from the interface rather than from scrolling the page, it is more complete than approaches that simulate scrolling. With many tracks, though, it can easily hit rate limits, so you need to slow down.