YoutubeDownloader

GTK3 UI for youtube,vimeo and others

Version 1.4.7

This simple GUI for the youtube-dl runs on linux. Goal was to get high quality audio and video using ffmepg where necessary.

Features

• Downloads either video(with audio) or audio only from youtube, vimeo and other platforms by simply dragging the url from the browser to the list.

• Videos from different sites (such as Youtube, Vimeo,Rumble and (German Broadcasting)Mediatheks can be downloaded.

• Press the "Download" button to download the list or single URLs.

• In addition an URL may be entered manually using the "plus" icon

• The URLs in the list can be saved and restored

• When downloading, the "Download" button becomes an "Interrupt" button, which enables you to stop the download while underway.

• Doubleclick on an downloaded entry will start playing it with the default audio/video player

• Via context menu entries can be removed, folders opened or files downloaded again(forced)

• Multi selection via "CRTL+A"

• Can also be started via terminal with "ytgui"

Settings

Clicking the "clogwheel" icon you may set the target directories for video and audio individually as well as the download quality.

There are 3 options for video quality:

• A MP4 container will lead mostly to a good result,but usually not the best
• MKV container can take literally any codec. Since youtube often uses webm container with vp9 and opus codecs this would be the choice for best quality
• The "auto" modus will not pass any merge requests to youtube-dl, so depending on the available data either MKV or webm container will be the output.

Change backend

If yt-dl is provided by your distro, it can't be updated by this app. However a local yt-dl version is provided -which can be activated by the "switcher" button next to the "Updater". The switcher button is not shown if no yt-dl has been provided by the distro - the internally provided python blob is used.

Prerequisites

• python3
• python3-gi (debian) or python-gobject (Arch)
• ffmpeg

Install on Arch or Manjaro

Search for "ytdownloader" in pamac, yay or on AUR. If done by hand:

• Download PKGBUILD from https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ytdownloader/
• Open terminal and execute "makepkg -s"
• sudo pacman -U ytdownloader....

Install on Ubuntu 20.04 or Mint 20.X

• (sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 10FA0B428C349916)
• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jentiger-moratai/mediatools
• sudo apt update
• sudo apt install ytdownloader

Manual install

The ./install.sh file should install ffmpeg, if not available (thanks to @fischer-felix). The python gtk libs should be already installed.

Below an exact description of dependent packages.

Prepare manual install on Debian (can't unpack the "modern" deb compression...)

sudo apt install python3-gi ffmpeg

Prepare manual install on Arch or Manjaro

sudo pacman -Syu python-gobject ffmpeg

Prepare manual install on Fedora

sudo dnf -y install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf -y install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf -y install ffmpeg

How to install(Manual)

• Download the current YtDownloader*.tar
• Unpack it and run the command sudo ./install.sh in the unpacked folder.
• Install just copies a desktop file and some python scripts to /opt/ytdownloader
• ffmpeg will be installed if the packagemanager is recognized (thanks to @fischer-felix) , the additional python lib should be already installed

Changes

• 2019-11 Immediate download when dragged, added context menus for delete, delete via "DEL" button, clean output file name
• 2019-12 Doubleclick invokes play of default audio or video player, open folder via context menu
• 2021-02 Support for youtube playlists - redesigned the model, multiple selection possible
• 2021-02 Added update for youtube-dl (if installed manually by the "installYoutube-dl" script)
• 2021-02 Fixed youtube playlist special url downloads
• 2021-03 Support for various media platforms
• 2021-11 Prepare for AUR PKGBUILD
• 2021-11 Moved backend from youtube-dl to yt-dlp
• 2021-11 Prepare for debian .deb
• 2022-02 Update install.sh(thanks to @fischer-felix) + Deb improvements
• 2022-05 Created deb version for jammy(Ubuntu 22.04)
• 2022-10 Updated regex for new progress in yt-dlp
• 2022-12 command is now ytgui
• 2023-10 yt-dlp not delivered for arch, but is dependency
• 2024-04 yt-dlp delivered for arch, make it selectable
• 2024-09 fix youtube change for playlists