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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

#31

Post by Piskvorrr »

Quequau wrote: post #9

For me I think the best UI for YT-DL would be in the context menu in Firefox. This is where I am most often when I see stuff I want to use it on and while I always already have a terminal window open, it would be nice not to have to switch windows. I already have a few different configs and aliases for getting stuff in the forms I really want. All I need is an even easier way to pass the URL in and trigger the downlo…

I have this: a browser extension (and an Android share option), a web server to consume the URLs thus clicked/shared, a database to track state, and a cron job to actually launch the download. It's a bunch of ugly hacks, but I can just right-click or share a video, and have all the rest happen automagically.

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

#32

Post by mellosouls »

Suggestion to author: as this is presumably intended to be a user-friendly front-end, consider providing installers.

I just tried installing on windows following the README and gave up after fixing npm proxy issues and encountering multiple other errors afterwards. I could fix it, but I don't have the time to investigate.

Anybody who can fix it, likely won't need a front end like this.

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

#33

Post by lukey_q »

josteink wrote: post #18

Skimming the code I see main.js hasn’t got a single semicolon. If you want to invite others to contribute, you may consider adopting a more widely employed js code-style. This seems to be written in a very personal, opinionated and unconventional way.

Writing personal projects in a personal way seems just fine to me :) Looking at that file it's very obvious what's happening after just a cursory glance. I'd much prefer code that's very easy to understand without semicolons than the opposite.

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

#34

Post by illuminati1911 »

bspammer wrote: post #15

I know this is quite selfish but the more accessible youtube-dl is, the more likely Google is to see it as a business threat, and the more likely they are to add some sort of content DRM. Just something to think about

You are right and there is nothing selfish about this.

Better few than none.

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

#35

Post by lightbulbjim »

dmos62 wrote: post #26

I use youtube-dl regularly, through mpv. What I'd really like, is a minimal youtube search, in-terminal or a minimal gui. Then I wouldn't need a browser to use youtube at all; I dislike having to rev up a 1000mb browser just to find a video and copy its address. Actually, now that I think about it, I can't remember if I've tried a text browser, might be bearable, though images of videos are sometimes helpful.

Have you tried Minitube?

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

#36

Post by alxlaz »

rakoo wrote: post #14
TeMPOraL wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Me too! Did someone make something like this? The alternative I'm considering is a script for my WM that essentially does "CTRL+L, delay 500ms, CTRL+C, append to a rolling 'to yt-download' list file".

I'm always weary about having timers in a script, because it often turns out to not be the correct amount. What about something like: - bookmark url in a specific "YouTube-dl" folder - watch tht folder from a daemon - when the folder changes, do the stuff automatically I'm sure there's a way to read bookmarks from outside the browser ?

This wasn't for youtube-dl, but a long time ago I used to have a somewhat similar system using a simple named pipe. Write the URL to that file, one URL per line; a simple ksh (back then :-) ) script read it on the other end and did its magic. The cool thing about it being that all you had to do was echo $url >> ~/.dl/queue.txt .

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

#37

Post by Xunxi »

mellosouls wrote: post #32

Suggestion to author: as this is presumably intended to be a user-friendly front-end, consider providing installers. I just tried installing on windows following the README and gave up after fixing npm proxy issues and encountering multiple other errors afterwards. I could fix it, but I don't have the time to investigate. Anybody who can fix it, likely won't need a front end like this.

Try https://github.com/MrS0m30n3/youtube-dl-gui/blob/master/READ...

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

#38

Post by Udo »

bspammer wrote: post #15

I know this is quite selfish but the more accessible youtube-dl is, the more likely Google is to see it as a business threat, and the more likely they are to add some sort of content DRM. Just something to think about

I agree, ideally youtube-dl would remain obscure, but YT has been on to it for a long time. It's somewhat of an arms race right now. I have to update youtube-dl every few weeks or it will simply stop working.

I would not be entirely suprised if Youtube one day just requires actual browser DRM to work at all. That would likely break every single smart TV out there, which is probably the only reason why they haven't yet done it. However, as they progress further on their path away from amateur content towards corporate-only content, I'd say there is a decent chance they'll pull that switch eventually. And die shortly after, of course.

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

#39

Post by r3bl »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #29
TeMPOraL wrote: 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 wish the installation was easier. It is reasonable to explain someone to write "youtube-dl -x " to download music from youtube... But having them installing ffmpeg and python, manually copying some exe to a safe place, and adding that as a enviroment variable really cuts the interest off.

That's because you're using Windows, which is really, really not designed with scripts in mind.

Point to Ubuntu in the Microsoft Store. Python is preinstalled. You may need to install Python's package manager (I'm not sure does it come preinstalled) with "sudo apt install python3-pip". Install it from Python's package manager with "pip3 install youtube-dl".

You could technically skip Python's package manager by just doing "sudo apt install youtube-dl", but updates are slow there, and you really don't want slow updates with this tool ("pip3 install --upgrade youtube-dl"). I'd argue that three commands are way easier to explain than installing two binaries and clicking around far too many times, especially because youtube-dl needs to be updated on a regular basis in order to work properly.

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

#40

Post by TeMPOraL »

Udo wrote: post #38
bspammer wrote: post #15

I know this is quite selfish but the more accessible youtube-dl is, the more likely Google is to see it as a business threat, and the more likely they are to add some sort of content DRM. Just something to think about

I agree, ideally youtube-dl would remain obscure, but YT has been on to it for a long time. It's somewhat of an arms race right now. I have to update youtube-dl every few weeks or it will simply stop working. I would not be entirely suprised if Youtube one day just requires actual browser DRM to work at all. That would likely break every single smart TV out there, which is probably the only reason why they haven't ye…

Which also sounds like a good reason to make copies of everything interesting on YouTube now, while we still can.
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