This is a small tool that provides a "one click download" functionality to youtube-dl on Windows.

Prerequisites

1. Java: Download Java JDK, add it to environment path variable
2. ffmpeg: Download ffmpeg Windows build, add it to environment path variable
3. youtube-dl: Download youtube-dl Windows executable. Test that you are able to download high-quality videos from youtube on command line (e.g. run youtube-dl https://youtube.com/somevideo in the folder where the youtube-dl executable is, after the download is finished check that the quality is good. If the quality is bad, you probably have an issue with ffmpeg.)

Installation

1. Download the latest release (a .zip which contains a .jar and a .bat)
2. Place the .jar, .bat, and youtube-dl.exe into a folder which will be your default download folder.

Typical usage

1. Copy the URL of the video you want to download to clipboard (CTRL+C).
2. Run one-click-youtube-dl.bat

That's it! youtube-dl is now downloading the video from the URL in the clipboard.

Advanced usage

You can pass arguments to youtube-dl. Simply open the one-click-youtube-dl.bat file with a text editor and add parameters to the end of the line.

For example, if I want to output really small files, I might add parameter -f worst, so the .bat file in this case would contain the following line:

java -jar one-click-youtube-dl.jar -f worst

A list of arguments for youtube-dl is available in the youtube-dl README.

In addition, you can pass argument --closeprompt if you want the command prompt to close after youtube-dl is finished downloading. Note that this will also close the prompt in case of errors.

Note that if your arguments use plain percent characters (%), you have to escape them by doubling, so that -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" should become -o "%%(title)s-%%(id)s.%%(ext)s". However you should not touch %'s that are not plain characters, e.g. environment variables for expansion should stay intact: -o "C:\%HOMEPATH%\Desktop\%%(title)s.%%(ext)s".

Why does this exist?

I used to use youtube-dl via command line, but it quickly became a chore. Then I started using youtube-dl-gui, which reduced manual typing and did the job, but had its faults.

My main gripe with it is that it doesn't offer one-click downloads. You have to open the program, click on the paste field, right-click, select paste, add pasted url to queue, and then click download. So the GUI is forcing you to do 6 clicks to download a single video.

My other gripe is that the GUI is actively supressing warnings and errors. When something goes wrong, the fault is actively hidden from the user so the user has no possibility to fix the problem. I recently experienced a scenario where youtube-dl-gui was unable to download any videos, and instead of showing some kind of error, the message it was showing in the GUI was "finished" (as in, the download 'finished' successfully, when in fact it failed to download anything at all). In contrast to youtube-dl-gui, this tool simply opens youtube-dl in a command prompt and keeps the window open so you can see all the output that youtube-dl gives.

Why Java, couldn't this be a simple bash script?

Sure, why not. I just don't have experience writing Windows bash scripts and I don't know how to do URL validation with bash. If you just had a simple bash script to run youtube-dl without URL validation, you would run the risk of running arbitrary bash commands from clipboard (if you accidentally had something in clipboard that you shouldn't have) -- so URL validation is important. It only took a few seconds to write rudimentary URL validation with Java, so I minimized my own time by writing this in a language that's familiar to me. The downside of this choice is that users need Java to run this, but then again, the type of people who are likely to use this are developers who already have Java on their machine, so it's not really an issue.