GUI

[JerzySpendel]

I started to write my user interface for youtube-dl here:

https://github.com/Yuri20/youtube-dl

It's only idea, i started this today. I know it's using about few percent of all youtube-dl options but as I said it's only an idea. Currently it have a lot small thinkgs to repair, I will do it later. What do you think about that? Maybe somebody wants to help?

[phihag]

Currently, you interact with youtube-dl via a subprocess. Therefore, I see little reason why the GUI should be tied to a specific version of youtube-dl, and could not simply be an external program.

Also, at least in my experience, virtually all URLs come from the webbrowser. Therefore, a webbrowser plugin may be a more suitable interface than a desktop program.

I'm leaving this issue open for a couple of days to get some visibility, but after that, I'm closing it. If you want to integrate the GUI into mainline youtube-dl, feel free to submit a pull request, but make sure that:

• GUI failures don't impact CLI usage (youtube-dl should be usable without X)
• the GUI uses Python calls instead of parsing command-line outputs
• the GUI can be tested automatically with a decent coverage, so that non-GUI changes don't break it by accident

Thanks!

[JerzySpendel]

Thanks for response. I will try to adjust code to your requirements. I don't have knowledge about making webbrowsers plugin so I will continue developing desktop aplication.

[JerzySpendel]

Hm, but I have one more question. Why do you want to use calls, Popen is from some reason bad? :P
If you want to I can change parsing Thread to read directly from output stream, not from file named "output".

[phihag]

command-line interaction with youtube-dl is certainly fine, but it's a way too heavy passing mechanism if the GUI should be integrated into mainline youtube-dl; if both GUI and core are from the same package, they should communicate via a more efficient mechanism. Otherwise, it's hard to avoid a number of obscure bugs.

For example, the current GUI will cause significant power consumption and will be laggy because of the various sleep calls. Also, tasks that should be extremely simple - like listing formats - become unreliable and buggy with a command-line interface unless the parsing (and the interface contract) is inspected strictly.