I'm searching for someone to take over this project!
Background: Yt-dlp is a commandline Python program, and as such, has a horrible developer experience in terms of embedding. This won't change in the forseeable future, and frustrates me to the point where I do not enjoy working on this yt-dlp frontend. Potential developments that I'd love to see would be a cross platform Python binary like this with all the required modules, or RustPython with all the required modules. Or a cross platform package manager that applications can rely on (so that downline can say "dear OS, make sure that yt-dlp is installed").
Downline is a free, cross-platform desktop application for downloading video and audio from YouTube and many other sites. It is a frontend for youtube-dl. Works on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Check out the other youtube-dl GUIs here, I personally quite recommend this one
- Works for links from several sites
- Choose audio and video quality (with support for 4K videos)
- Convert audio to multiple formats
(mp3, aac, m4a and more) - Convert video to multiple formats
(mp4, webm, mkv) - Pause and resume downloads
- Download entire playlist and channel
- Download and embed subtitles
- Download multiple files simultaneously
To support this project, you can donate to the developers.
If you have pip installed, you can install youtube-dl by running
# Linux
sudo pip install --upgrade youtube_dl
or
# Windows and macOS
pip install --upgrade youtube_dl
Alternativly for Windows, you can download the .exe file here
On macOS, you can install it using homebrew:
brew install youtube-dl
Or on Linux (and macOS), you can use the following command:
sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
Detailed instuctions are available on the offical youtube-dl website
- Paste the link into the bar on the top of the screen.
If Downline detects a link in your clipboard, it will automatically paste it, otherwise you can use the blue
+button on the right of the text field. - Press the
enterkey, the video will then appear in the list below. - Click on the thumbnail of the video to start the download.
- Paste the link of the playlist. Make sure the link looks like this:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=..., so that it's pointing directly to the playlist and not to some video inside the playlist. - Press the
enterkey, the videos included in the playlist will then appear in the list below. - Uncollapse the bottom bar by clicking on the little arrow in the bottom center.
- Click the play button in the left of the bar to start downloading all videos.