Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 142 posts

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

#101

Post by t0astbread »

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…

You made me realize I accidentally used the worst audio quality all the time.

I thought higher number = higher quality but then I had a look at the manpage again...

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

#102

Post by TeMPOraL »

realusername wrote: post #93
TeMPOraL wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's exactly what I do, I make a copy of every video I watch.

I'm inclined to start doing it too; I'll try to wire something up this week that saves to my NAS over LAN. From time to time, I browse my "Liked" / "Favourited" videos on YouTube to find something I've seen years before, only to discover that it's gone.

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

#103

Post by halfjoking »

xwdv wrote: post #81
toomanybeersies wrote: post #57

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.

If it wasn't for the copyright infringement this wouldn't be a bad business idea.

One video per day is free - if you want extra "credits" pay for it on the website.

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

#104

Post by terragon »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #31
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.

I'd love to replicate what you've set up. The web server and from job doesn't sound too difficult, but I'm confused about the browser extension and Android share option. I'd be very grateful if you could elaborate further on that.

Thanks.

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

#105

Post by severine »

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.

> What I'd really like, is a minimal youtube search, in-terminal or a minimal gui

It exists! It's called SMTube but don't let the name confuse you, as it works with a lot of media players, including mpv:

https://www.smtube.org/en/index

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

#106

Post by joshstrange »

I used a modified version of this [0] (modified [1]) running on my home NAS and an iOS Shortcut to easily be able to "share" any webpage that has a video on it to a Siri shortcut that makes an API call back to that docker service. It will automatically download it for me and drop it wherever I have specified. I can then process those files later. It's a great way for me to grab a video I want while I'm on my phone. It can even handle queuing of videos so I can share multiple in a row if I want. I've found it quite useful.

It's no replacement for the CLI but it's better than copying the url, opening my ssh client, connecting back, navigating to the right spot, running youtube-dl, waiting for it to finish (this is the worst part), then closing my ssh app, and moving on with my life.

[0] https://github.com/hyeonsangjeon/youtube-dl-nas

[1] https://github.com/joshstrange/youtube-dl-nas/tree/https-fix

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

#107

Post by Gracana »

benj111 wrote: post #59
fock wrote: 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…

I liked the "Commando" GUI in the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop:

http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/soft...

Using it is like pulling up the manpage while typing out a command, but interactive. Once you're done formulating your command, it runs in your worksheet and you can modify it and re-run it if necessary, just like any other command.

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

#108

Post by davesmith1983 »

r3bl wrote: post #39
Double_a_92 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny how I've been using vb, python, perl and bash scripts. Windows for the past 20 years. I suppose that didn't happen?

Why do people who use Linux automatically think you cannot use scripts or there are no scripting languages on Windows?

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

#109

Post by davesmith1983 »

r3bl wrote: post #46
Mindwipe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you honestly write this down thinking it was remotely any easier?

Then the alternative? Absolutely. The alternative requires finding the latest version of Python, installing it, modifying the environment path, finding the binary for youtube-dl, installing it, and only then figuring out how it works. "Execute these commands only once and then just type youtube-dl https://example.com . If something breaks, run this command to upgrade the script and retry." If the target audience is s…

You don't have to do any of that nonsense.

https://chocolatey.org/packages/youtube-dl

You install choco and add Youtube-dl. Job done. Which is mechanically pretty much the same as the way you install it via brew on a mac.

I use Arch Linux and a Mac at home but at work I have to use Windows and I am constantly annoyed by people who never seem to use Windows telling others that it is impossible to do X without having to use some sort of Unix VM / Cygwin or WSL, when it reality is can be very simple.

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

#110

Post by benj111 »

majewsky wrote: post #78
benj111 wrote: post #69

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" 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…

I put 'right thing' in inverted commas because I know how slippery it can be.

Gui apps have defaults too, this isn't a problem unique to terminal apps. I'll go further and say GUI apps suffer more because they tend to design around a default and have many fewer non default options, in the name of being easy to use. Terminal apps on the other hand 'suffer' because they don't make enough assumptions about how it is to be used.

Suffer is very much in inverted commas though, sometimes you want to do that niche thing, and having something that makes no assumptions about how it will be used is great. On the other hand having to read a manpage for the simplest of things is not so great.

Post reply on HN