youtube-dl-gui - A simple video downloader

Rationale

youtube-dl is a great tool to download videos, but it is not very convenient:

• Its user interface is a command line, not a GUI.

• Downloading several videos in parallel requires opening a command line window for each video.

• Monitoring progress requires the user to switch to each command line window in turn and read the progress message.

youtube-dl-gui is a GUI built on top of youtube-dl, using gooey and some homemade extensions to gooey, in order to provide a more convenient user interface for downloading videos.

Usage

youtube-dl-gui allows a smooth workflow with minimal effort on the part of the user:

• Copy the URL of the video you wish to download.

• Launch youtube-dl-gui.

• The URL present in the clipboard is detected and preloaded in the UI. If the default download directory suits you, simply press the Enter key to start downloading the video.

  

• youtube-dl-gui displays a nice green progress bar while the video is downloading, as well as an estimate of the remaining time.

  

• As soon as the title of the video is determined, it is displayed as the title for the youtube-dl-gui window.

• On Windows, monitoring download progress is as simple as pressing Alt+Tab: youtube-dl-gui windows bear the title of the video they are downloading, and the green progress bar gives a visual indication of progress.

  

Keyboard shortcuts are available for the following buttons:

• Start - Enter key
• Stop - S key
• Close - Escape key
• Edit - E key
• Restart - R key

Installation

Clone the repo.

Install dependencies:

pip install gooey
pip install pyperclip

If your youtube-dl-gui directory is visible from PYTHONPATH, simply use python -m youtube-dl-gui to run the application.

Compatibility

youtube-dl-gui requires Python 3.7 or later.

gooey_extensions.py has been tested with version 1.0.8 of gooey.

I have only tested youtube-dl-gui under Windows 10, but it should be pretty portable and run on any OS on which youtube-dl, gooey and pyperclip can run. This presumably includes most Linux flavors, as well as MacOS, although I have not made any tests on these OS's.