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Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

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Re: Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

#121

Extended search with previews will be great and playback in external player will be great features to add. But anyway, Youtube brakes API too often and maintaining any of YT apps is very painful.

I'm going to add functionality that makes it such that the latest version of youtube-dl is always installed, so as long as youtube-dl works the app should work too.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

#122
post #76
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to install it but I couldn't install WxPython3 via SourceForge so I couldn't get the deps to work. Plus the maintainer of that app doesn't care much for supporting OS X and Linux (basically tells people to just go use Windows) so I wanted to use Electron where I can package an app for all platforms.

I'm a bit ignorant of the details b/c I haven't touched web stuff before. But on a high level, how does a Javascript/Electron app wrap-around/bundle-with youtube-dl - which (looking at github) is a python app? Or does youtube-dl need to be already be pre-installed on the system?

Electron is a small Chromium browser that can interact with Node.JS, youtube-dl is packaged with this app as a node package manager dependency. The youtube-dl binary is downloaded and then called via a child process, let me know if that clears things up for you.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

#123
post #65
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just summed up the gui/command line dichotomy. It's something we could do better at bridging the gap between. Tbh things like this, a gui front end for a terminal app seem the best way forward. I don't know why they aren't used a lot more in open source, it just seems to match up so much better to the open source model of a random person developing a project and no one taking over when that person loses intere…

> the front ends are the sexy bits For a lot of people this isn't true. I think for web developers, making guis is fun (why this is done in electron). For a lot of non web developers, making the actual tool is the fun part. Having to then fiddle around with some gui feels less like programming and more like a chore.

Actually I hate doing frontends way prefer to work with serverside code than play with the DOM, but I recognize that a good frontend is super important to the app to allow people to reason about how it works and to help them through the process, but for my 2c I would way prefer to tinker with backend code all day :)

Re: Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

#124
post #59
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First thought on this project: hey, why electron yt-dl works perfectly from the command line, I type the programm, paste the url. Second thought: might be nice for selecting from the myriad of options. Well...

You've just summed up the gui/command line dichotomy. It's something we could do better at bridging the gap between. Tbh things like this, a gui front end for a terminal app seem the best way forward. I don't know why they aren't used a lot more in open source, it just seems to match up so much better to the open source model of a random person developing a project and no one taking over when that person loses intere…

Even being someone who uses the CLI, now that I have this app I will probably rarely use the CLI, it's just nicer to see things visually as to be able to reason about them. Also selecting the directory etc is something way more easily done via a GUI than the command line. There's a reason why operating system manufacturers created a GUI and we all use them today, they fit with our brains much more than just using a terminal.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

#125

I predict, that once youtube-dl becomes easy-enough to use for the masses, YT will shut it down in one way or the other. The user-facing business model of YT is quite simple: > You get to see great variety of videos, but have to watch ads every now and then. So from their perspective, youtube-dl allows you to steal the content w/o giving anything back to either YT or the creator. To make this fair/sustainable youtube…

What if you're downloading videos from someone who has been demonetized?

Re: Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

#127
post #8

Suggestion to author: allow pasting and downloading more than one link at a time, and selecting audio/video + desired formats. Suggestion to everyone else: learn the CLI. Then you can do things like me last night. My wife collected a list of classical music videos she wants to play to our kid, and all I did was: youtube-dl -x --audio-format "mp3" --audio-quality 0 -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" -a music.txt to get the whole…

I plan to make an 'advanced' mode that will allow people to pass custom flags, select file formats etc, especially given the large initial interest. Right now this was mostly a proof of concept and targeted towards nonsophisticated end users but if the project grows those things will definitely land in time, thanks for the suggestions.

No problem & good luck. I'm definitely not a target user, but my mom is. The Electron aspect is a bit painful though manageable, but as long as she could literally download the .exe, and the basic functionality of the product was simple enough (click to open, paste URL, click to save; optionally click to specify some advanced option; no tracking or telemetry whatsoever), I'd happily install it for her. I already installed her a standalone console .exe + ffmpeg, but it's slightly too painful to use[0].

(If you ever happen to grow the project to the point of offering different languages, drop me a line, and I'll give you Polish language translations.)

EDIT: Also consider auto-updates for your application; it would be best if it could update its youtube-dl dependency independently from the app itself. I don't like auto-updates too much (especially when they're forced), but as others point out, youtube-dl and YouTube are in a state of cold war; YouTube downloads tend to magically break every couple of weeks now, which requires users to update the youtube-dl script.

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[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...

Re: Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

#128
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is familiar or comfortable with the command line. A lot of my friends don't use youtube-dl for this exact reason. They end up messaging me, asking me to download files for them.

Why not just create a simple phone number with twilio that they can text a url to and then it fires a script to download that video and upload it to s3 for them? Shouldn’t take more than an hour IMO.

Mainly because I actually like talking to my friends, and I'm often interested in whatever video/music they want me to download for them.

I have no desire to automate my interactions with my friends, especially for something that's easy enough for me to do and only takes a minute of my time.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I plan to make an 'advanced' mode that will allow people to pass custom flags, select file formats etc, especially given the large initial interest. Right now this was mostly a proof of concept and targeted towards nonsophisticated end users but if the project grows those things will definitely land in time, thanks for the suggestions.

No problem & good luck. I'm definitely not a target user, but my mom is. The Electron aspect is a bit painful though manageable, but as long as she could literally download the .exe, and the basic functionality of the product was simple enough (click to open, paste URL, click to save; optionally click to specify some advanced option; no tracking or telemetry whatsoever), I'd happily install it for her. I already inst…

Thanks for the input. Yep your mom would definitely be a target user but even for myself the app has been very useful, when you know you have a nice GUI to play with it reduces the cost of doing certain fun projects that require quick downloads so it is nifty for everyone to have in their backpocket, and yes the .dmg for OS X is ready and I'll have an .exe file out relatively soon too.

Auto-update will definitely be a feature it's quite easy with the youtube-dl package I'm using.

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