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A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

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Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#101

Post by lpcvoid »

poisonborz wrote: post #82
lpcvoid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't get how you can be so defensive about Electron. It's technically inferior to literally any native solution such as wxwidgets or Qt. RAM usage, CPU cycles, Hard drive space... it's such a disrespectful stance on computing resources.

Because talking about it here completely misses the point. Yes, Electron has a number of problems, so what? This is an app that you open and close within 3 minutes. Open Video Downloader is a very usable software that doesn't have any direct alternatives right now to my knowledge. It's actually a good example of how a great, easily accessible UI framework can enable the creation of cross-platform apps that nobody did…

And by normalizing Electron we get even more of the same, instead of convincing people to learn better tools for the job. It's a race to the bottom.

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#102

Post by m348e912 »

iKlsR wrote: post #81
FerritMans wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I have been looking for, any chance you could make this public?

Unfortunately no immediate plans to do so. It was a quick weekend project to scratch an itch.

It's comments like this that make me realize that not everyone has an utilitarian mindset. I'd be happy to share my weekend project if someone expressed interest, even if it wasn't perfect. Just don't expect me to support it.

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#103

Post by lostgame »

davzie wrote: post #31

Many in here don't understand why you need this if it's a CLI app which obviously means you could probably monetise this and earn a living from it.

I think there’s a massive legal risk from monetizing something that exists to download mostly copyrighted content.

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#104

Post by iKlsR »

m348e912 wrote: post #102
iKlsR wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately no immediate plans to do so. It was a quick weekend project to scratch an itch.

It's comments like this that make me realize that not everyone has an utilitarian mindset. I'd be happy to share my weekend project if someone expressed interest, even if it wasn't perfect. Just don't expect me to support it.

Support is one and you can't blindly assume that it's in a shareable format from a quick braindump sprint. Lots of hardcoded personal stuff, wonky incomplete features, mixed absolute and relative paths etc. It was NEVER intended to be shared and would require time to cleanup to even distribute a binary. It also works based on how I use youtube, it's not a general purpose tool so it's super opinionated. I simply shared it here because it seemed relevant to the topic. :)

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#105

Post by bityard »

FerritMans wrote: post #76
iKlsR wrote: post #50

I built my own personal version where it runs in the background and automatically downloads stuff I like (I highly curate my likes) or send to select playlists. Too often I go through my favorites and see deleted videos so I just cooked up something one weekend. I have an entire hard drive dedicated as an offline archive where I can playback at anytime, search the library and it even alerts me if any video or audio I…

This is exactly what I have been looking for, any chance you could make this public?

You don't need code for this... if you pass youtube-dl a playlist URL instead of a video URL, it will download all (public) videos from the playlist. Write a cron job for it and you're done.

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#106

Post by HWR_14 »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #97
_jal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best clothes are hand-tailored specifically to fit your body. And yet, most people wear mass-produced clothes.

Well yes but to continue the metaphor almost nobody wears barrels

Mass produced clothes are significantly cheaper than barrels. Several orders of magnitude.

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#107

Post by HWR_14 »

MR4D wrote: post #67
notRobot wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

preferably not electron :)

I get the hate for Electron, but to me, despite the issues, it's not going away. I think a better approach is to figure out how to make Electron more performant in the various OSes. I haven't gotten into the internals of Electron, so I'm not the one to reflect on the approach, but seeing some of the improvements that MSFT made with Edge over Chrome in memory usage gives me hope that this is achievable, even if it doe…

> back in the 1990's we faced a similar thing, where web "apps" were ugly and slow

And when's the last time you loaded an app with the Java VM on the desktop, unless it was Eclipse and you were about to use it to write more Java?

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#108

Post by lpcvoid »

crazygringo wrote: post #96
lpcvoid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't get how you can be so defensive about Electron. It's technically inferior to literally any native solution such as wxwidgets or Qt. RAM usage, CPU cycles, Hard drive space... it's such a disrespectful stance on computing resources.

> it's such a disrespectful stance on computing resources If it lets somebody accomplish something productive they wouldn't have had the time/expertise to do otherwise, then it's the best possible use of computing resources there could be. Computing resources are a means to an end. Not an end.

Constantly providing an "easy way out" for problems in form of technically inferior solutions is not a good path to tread on.

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#109

Post by cabalamat »

bavell wrote: post #90
cabalamat wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The best format might be one specially defined for the job. I built a GUI-builder ages ago (in Python, compiling to Python which calls Tkinter to build the GUI). Here's a sample of what the UI-definition language looked like: https://github.com/cabalamat/parrot/blob/master/simple2.par

Looks fine and dandy but could also be represented in JSON with not much effort and then you'd be using an interchange format understood by many tools instead of a bespoke language. I'm definitely biased being a web dev but JSON is just so widely used and supported... seems ideal for small bits of config like this.

> Looks fine and dandy but could also be represented in JSON with not much effort

Yes it could. But writing the UI descriptions would be harder in JSON than in my bespoke language.

My goal in writing the tool was to maker UI descriptions as easy to write as possible. If I hadn't cared about that I wouldn't simply continued to hard-code them in Tkinter.

> I'm definitely biased being a web dev but JSON is just so widely used and supported

JSON didn't exist when I originally wrote this. If i was doing it today, it's entirely possible I would use JSON as a data interchange format.

Re: A cross-platform GUI for YouTube-dl

#110

Post by cabalamat »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #71
cabalamat wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to define the behavour of your UI elements as well as their placement, at which point you're writing a program. The best language to write a program in is a Turing-complete programming language specially designed for that task, not some cobbled together UI-definition language with ad hoc add-ons to processing.

Everyone has different requirements. For many things, I'd take a quick JSON file configuration over having to write everything from scratch again and reinventing the wheel. Like it or not, the whole low code movement is about this.

> I'd take a quick JSON file configuration

Let's say your GUI has several input boxes. You want to validate those boxes. You need something Turing-complete to do this, because if it isn't Turing complete and the tool is used by lots of people, someone's GUI will require it.

> the whole low code movement is about this

That's OK provided you accept that it limits what can be done.

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