I am damn sure that a good number of you must be familiar with youtube-dl by now. It’s an open- source cross-platform CLI app for downloading videos from YouTube and a host of many other sites. It is written in Python and released to the public domain for interested parties to use and modify it however they like.
Famous as it is, one cannot deny that it will be more convenient to have a GUI for it and that’s where YouTube-DL GUI comes in handy.
YouTube-DL GUI (YouTube-DLG) is a cross platform front-end GUI of the popular youtube-dl media downloader. It is written in wxPython to be open source and it automatically supports all of youtube-dl’s supported sites.
Features in YouTube-DL GUI
- FOSS: free to download and use with source code available on GitHub.
- Embed subtitles into (mp4) video files.
- Support for authentication and proxy usage.
- Option to specify user agent and referrer.
- Support for multiple youtube-dl CLI options.
- Option to customize file name format for downloaded audio and video files
- Post-processing options including
- Extract audio from video file
- Add metadata
- Select audio quality
- Embed thumbnail in audio file
Thanks to the main WebUpd8 PPA, the following command will work to get YouTube-DL GUI installed on Ubuntu 17.04 and 16.04 / Linux Mint 18.x.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8 $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install youtube-dlg
You should know that the latest YouTube-DL GUI doesn’t work in Ubuntu 14.04 because the distro doesn’t have an available wxPython 3 (a runtime requirement) in its official repositories. Earlier versions should still work.
If you don’t care much for getting automatic updates then you can pick up the latest .deb package by clicking the button below:
[mks_button size=”medium” title=”Download YouTube-DLG .deb Package” style=”squared” url=”http://ppa.launchpad.net/nilarimogard/webupd8/ubuntu/pool/main/y/youtube-dlg/” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow” bg_color=”#46698E” txt_color=”#fff” icon=”fa-download” icon_type=”fa” nofollow=”1″]
Important: you’ll also need to have the twodict package installed and you can get it from here.
Once installed YouTube-DL GUI, just Enter the URL (or multiple URLs) in the designated field and click “Add” and click the start button to begin your download. The remaining options are virtually intuitive to use.
Do you have any experience with youtube-dl? Tell us what you think about this GUI project in the comments section below.
Works fine on my xubuntu 16.04 – Though I had to update Python manually and install the rest from .deb files
Is this available for Lubuntu 17.10 ?
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
Cannot add PPA: ‘ppa:~nilarimogard/ubuntu/webupd8’.
ERROR: ‘~nilarimogard’ user or team does not exist.
Using KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu 16.04.
What I do is install mpv and youtube-dl. mpv [url] automatically defaults to checking against youtube-dl. I can then just go to tonvid.com (YouTube but with a very simple interface) with w3m. I have my keyboard shortcut for opening with an external browser set to mpv -ytdl –vo=”opengl” –ao=”alsa”. My user agent for w3m is set to mobile Safari. This way, video sites default to mp4 and pressing Shift+M opens the URL with mpv and will play anything youtube-dl supports. If you’re in TTY and a high enough run level (3+; it might be 5), this works too. Though, me personally, I have to switch –vo=”opengl” to –vo=”drm” when in TTY. You can also install w3m-img if you need images beside video links to help navigate. I don’t though; I just use Shift+I because it doesn’t always display correctly.
youtube-dl is one of my fav utils. I’m glad I came across the CLI app long before I knew of the existence of this GUI front-end. I might never have bothered to learn the CLI syntax – which, it turns out, is fairly straighforward and adaptable. I might still give this a whirl to see if it makes certain operations easier.
In my experience, most nifty CLI-only apps have a syntax that is fairly straightforward and adaptable. But yes, try the GUI app and see. You might like it better.