Video Downloader – frontend for yt-dlp

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created in February 2005, and purchased by Google in November 2006. The web service lets billions of people find, watch, and share originally-created videos. It displays a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. It also offers a forum for people to communicate with others around the world, and acts as a distribution platform.

Funky developers have created applications that allow you to bypass the web-only barrier of YouTube.

yt-dlp is everything youtube-dl used to be and more besides. It takes all the great features of youtube-dl, exploits your full network download speeds, and offers some surprising useful features not found in other projects.

yt-dlp is a command-line affair. Many users prefer using a GUI. Step forward Video Downloader, a tool which lets you download videos from YouTube and other websites.

Installation

We’re testing Video Downloader using Ubuntu 23.10.

We installed the software from the Snap Store.

If you don’t like snaps, there’s also a Flatpak available. And there’s a package in the Arch User Repository for Arch and Arch-based distros. There’s also a distro-specific package for Fedora.

In Operation

Here’s an image of Video Downloader. At the top of the interface are the Audio and Video tabs. In the image below, we’ve chosen the Video tab and entered a URL to download. We can pick the resolution. Not showing is the option to prefer the MPEG format.

Once you’ve selected the resolution, just click the orange Download button. The video is downloading in the image below. Instead of a single video, the GUI can also download whole playlists. And there’s support for password-protected and private videos.

As should be obvious, the GUI is very simple to use. The hamburger icon in the top bar (first image) lets you change the download location, and displays the keyboard shortcuts.

Had we chosen the Audio tab, the video is converted into MP3 format.

Summary

Video Downloader is a really basic frontend to yt-dlp. It might be all you really need.

Website: github.com/Unrud/video-downloader
Support:
Developer: Unrud
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Video Downloader is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Related Software

Read our verdict in the software roundup.

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