I have quite a lot of clips, mostly uTube I would like to keep in Real Player and it is a program I use quite often. However, it has now quite suddently become slow to freezing a lot of the time and I am wondering whether to uninstall it, although I have tried an update to it which didn't improve things. I have not used this computer for a while and maybe there have been developments which need configuration. I have updated direct X with Microsoft. Any other ideas what could be making this program freeze and crawl when it used to be fine a couple of months ago?

I don't know what problem is causing this, but I do know real player is quite memory intensive and uses certain memory resident executables on boot up on your machine. I hate any software which loads crapware onto my computer so i would advise using Real alternative which uses the realplayer codecs in a windows media player instead. try here http://www.codecguide.com/download_real.htm

I would also suggest as a more complete option getting KMPlayer which is also freeware. This will play realplayer files and everything else i've ever found very nice indeed! http://kmplayer.en.softonic.com/

Many thanks and I will try that. I notice there is a Firefox add-on for uTube easy video downloader, so I installed that but can't see how it works. Realplayer used to flag 'Download this Video' which was very handy..

I use Video DownloadHelper as my Firefox add-on. Simple to use in my opinion.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006

Yes Downloadhelper is a great addon, I used it to get some clips to create a DVD for my kid last week, results were great!