Show HN: YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by echelon » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

Mindwipe wrote: post #44

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

It's coming regardless, as soon as Google can get their CDN efficiency to a point where they can do on the fly encryption of the stream (or post encryption insertion if they can figure out a way to do the key management) with the advertising embedded they'll push the switch anyway, to prevent ad blocking.

That capability is truly scary. Once the ads are baked in and everyone has that capability, there will be no escape. It'll be worse when they DRM HTML itself and force the ads down our throat.

It feels like we've backslid by miles and miles since I first got on the Internet in the late 90's. I no longer like this Internet.

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

#112

Post by xwdv » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

halfjoking wrote: post #103

xwdv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn’t really matter, if you get a dmca takedown just delete that file. But I doubt you will, especially if it’s just your friends hosting it.

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

#113

Post by mayeaux » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

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.

Even though people have downvoted you, personally I agree with you, I haven't added any semicolons to main.js though because that file was automatically created in the original project I forked, if I ever have to edit it I will add the semicolons as I'm there but I haven't touched that file yet.

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

#114

Post by benj111 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #77

benj111 wrote: 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…

> 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.

I think its more:

A) power users having different priorities to light users. That tool you use every day, you probably use keyboard short cuts, know all the flags. The tool you use once every 6 months, you probably scan the menus and check the man page. Open source tends to be focused more on the power users, mainly because its probably power users that made the thing to start with.

B) open source tends not to be a 'product'. There aren't focus groups and usability testers, the first releases are Alphas and Betas so tend to attract technically minded people that find their way around less discoverable interfaces.

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

#115

Post by mayeaux » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

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.

I plan to package platform specific FFMpeg with the app especially now given the large initial interest. Then once I package everything for the different platforms via Electron it should be as easy as installing any other application an end-user would install, that's the hope.

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

#116

Post by mayeaux » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #40

Udo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, YouTube-Dl already has 50k stars on Github, it's certainly not obscure anymore. Although I'm not suggesting breaking the TOS if people are going to be using it to archive content then the best bet is probably to have the content archived as quickly as possible rather than trying to keep youtube-dl lowkey (ship has sailed) so as to not trigger DRM from YouTube

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

#117

Post by mayeaux » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

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.

Frankly I wouldn't mind making a browser extension that does exactly that, and then if you go back to a video you've already downloaded before it plays it from disk as opposed to from the network. Something I've thought about.

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

#118

Post by mayeaux » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

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 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.

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

#119

Post by mayeaux » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

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.

Yup I plan to add installers for each platform, I just finished this yesterday and wanted to share it with people so I fired it off. Happy to work through the errors you ran into if you want to open an issue on GH but yes, installers will be coming pretty quick thanks!

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

#120

Post by mayeaux » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:14 PM UTC

bravura wrote: post #48

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

At the moment no but it does handle downloading playlists/channels correctly.