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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

#71
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.

yourube-viewer thats for search download or stream and can sign in many as well as many other function. it is terminal only no images.

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

#72
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be the use-case for Chocolatey or something like that, if more than just youtube-dl is going to be used in console. (Dunno which package managers are alright in Windows.)

Chocolatey is the way to go. Once you have it installed, it's just `choco install youtube-dl` and `choco install ffmpeg`. This is how you get Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/install .

Chocolatey also bypasses all the dark parterns of download websites which is a big plus for a non technical user. I wish Microsoft would take it over and integrate it in windows by default.

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

#73
post #48

Could I paste a bunch of URLs and it would create a queue ?

If you have a bunch of urls, paste them in NimbleText, a fantastic utility to combine a list with a pattern, and create a bunch of command lines (syntax is trivial: "youtube-dl $0")

Use chocolatey to install youtube-dl CLI as a self-contained executable.

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

#74
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…

Didn't try this myself yet, but if you search FF extensions for 'invid' you'll find there are a bunch of extensions related to invidio.us which is like youtube + download button, and more. So there might be something to your taste there.

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

#75
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…

You can even do fun things like transcode a stream into a format that omxplayer can handle and render a video straight onto a Raspberry Pi without having to download it (and without X11) 'omxplayer' '--blank' '--aspect-mode' 'stretch' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKNYsKwM6HI' )

While I was still using my Raspberry Pi as a "media center", I wrote a small server using tornado that did this via a URL: https://github.com/filmor/rpi-media/tree/master/ytdld

I had a small javascript commandlet in my bookmarks that allowed me to start playback directly from a youtube (or any other youtube-dl supported) page.

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

#76
post #5

Why not just use Youtube-dlg? Does everything it needs to and doesn't require you to use electron.

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?

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

#77
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…

> 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

Elitism. A lot of people in tech have gigantic egos and believe they are better than everyone else because of their arcane knowledge, so they have no desire to see anything become more discoverable or easier to use.

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

#78
post #69
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't script this GUI. You can't use Cron with an interactive GUI. You can't parse stdin/out/err. Each have their pros and cons. I'd say what makes most sense is a library with frontends (CLI, TUI, GUI, (web)socket, etc) In this case I wouldn't need a GUI with Electron. All I would need is a Firefox extension for youtube-dl (or the hypothetical library). Why keep reinventing wheel? Hence library. One annoying thi…

"You can't script this GUI. You can't use Cron with an interactive GUI. You can't parse stdin/out/err" No but you can script the underlying youtube-dl so with the gui front end you get the best of both worlds. Re defaults, that isn't an inherent shortcoming of terminal apps. Theres no reason why 'youtube-dl url ' shouldn't just do the 'right thing'. I agree it's a common problem though.

> Theres no reason why 'youtube-dl url' shouldn't just do the 'right thing'.

The error in your reasoning is that you assume the existence of a singular right thing. Software that attempts to just do the right thing tends to suffer from what I call Overly Clever Syndrome. I hate waiters or store clerks that second-guess my motivations. Why should I like software that does the same?

That said, `youtube-dl $url` will download the pointed-to video in the best available quality, so that's a pretty decent default.

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

#79
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chocolatey is the way to go. Once you have it installed, it's just `choco install youtube-dl` and `choco install ffmpeg`. This is how you get Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/install .

Chocolatey also bypasses all the dark parterns of download websites which is a big plus for a non technical user. I wish Microsoft would take it over and integrate it in windows by default.

You're describing the Windows Store.

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

#80
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they already have? `youtube-dl` has been breaking a lot for me lately. I've been using the Fedora repo build for many years and don't remember it ever breaking, not once. Now in the last couple of months it had suddenly stopped working 4 or 5 times, which forced me to install the official build from `pip`, which is updated more frequently.

youtube-dl is one of those rare programs that you shouldn't download from a repository. Do this instead: - Download from the project page and put it anywhere in your path (it's a single file) - Subsequently do 'youtube-dl -U' whenever you want to update. It updates itself in-place with the latest release (there's usually 2 or 3 released per week)

What's the difference to installing 2-3 updates per week over the distro? One should be installing distro updates daily anyway.
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