Provide an official exe for windows

[phihag]

A standalone exe file for Windows would be nice. See if we can maybe create it with wine (?), or, failing that, somehow create it on Windows.

• Make sure youtube-dl -U still works as intended

[phihag]

yoshco says:

i previously used py2exe.org for this (messy)
also this effort (including source).

[obeythepenguin]

Try this one: http://youtube2mp3.sourceforge.net/runtime/youtube-dl.exe
I update it periodically as part of youtube2mp3, so that link should always point to a relatively recent version.

[obeythepenguin]

By the way, youtube-dl -U wouldn't work for an exe file, for two reasons:

• it assumes you're running the Python script itself, and downloads the latest version straight from Git
• it assumes youtube-dl can overwrite itself while it's running.

Those are both fair assumptions on Unix, but not on Windows: with an exe, you aren't running the Python directly but in compiled form, and Windows won't allow a running process to overwrite its own executable.

[phihag]

@obeythepenguin Great - would you be willing to commit the build script you're using under Public Domain?

Also, updating can work, that's precisely why I added the notice.

• When updating from an exe, it would check for a new exe instead of the .py file
• Overwriting itself of course requires write access to the exe file. And we'll have to find a workaround to overwrite our own file, for example executing a shell command to wait a second and write the file in the background and then terminating immediately.

[obeythepenguin]

@phihag Yes, I will gladly commit it under the Public Domain. My script is here:
http://youtube2mp3.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/youtube2mp3/youtube2mp3/raw-file/b1e4252e9f55/scripts/setup.py

Sorry for the (very) late reply; I'm mainly a Mercurial user, so I don't check Github often.

[FiloSottile]

We have had a complete WINE exe creation system for some time now