Open Video Downloader is a cross-platform youtube-dl client with graphical interface, made in Electron and node.js. Remember that youtube-dl is a simple free program to download videos from almost any website with the command line.
Among the main features of Open Video Downloader or youtube-dl-gui highlights that can download from various platforms (YouTube, vimeo, Twitter and many others, as explained by the creator), download multiple videos and playlists and channels in one go. Specifically, up to 32 videos can be downloaded synchronously.
Besides this, youtube-dl-gui allows you to select the resolution and the format in which you want to download, in addition to downloading private videos (currently only tested on YouTube). It shows you the size that the download will occupy on your system and the application automatically maintains the ytdl update.
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Different operating systems and future plans
This application is tested on Windows, Linux and MacOS and its creator warns that “if you decide to build for another platform, it may or may not work.”
If you are on Windows, you must make sure that the Microsoft Visual C ++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) it’s installed. Regarding the dependencies of this app for MacOS and Linux, it is Python, although they warn that in the operating system for Apple it is pre-installed and that in Linux it “almost always comes pre-installed”.
To use it, you have to download the installer or executable corresponding to your system and paste a link in the upper box that will appear on the screen of this app. Wait for the application to gather all the necessary metadata and, after that, press “Download” and the videos will be saved in your downloads folder.
On the other hand, among the features provided is that of selecting individual audio and video codecs (in advanced mode), offering a list of all audio qualities and having support for downloading livestreams.
A bit of youtube-dl history
In 2006, the year that YouTube was acquired by Google, García, the creator of youtube-dl, lived in a town in the Avilés region, in Asturias. And, despite being close to one of the principal cities of the Principality, the area in which he lived lacked access to the Internet by cable and ADSL. Your only option to connect to the Internet it went through a 56 ks modem that gave it a download speed of 4 KB / s. A situation that made it “painful” to access any YouTube video: thus, for example, a video of only 10 MB would take 40 minutes to load.
Faced with this situation, García was interested in a solution that would allow him to download the video directly to the hard disk. And, if possible, with a download management system that allows you to resume them.
The software was born as a command line program written in Python, specifically in 143 lines of code (more comments). It was released on SourceForge (GitHub didn’t exist yet) under the MIT license on August 8, 2006. Before the year was out, Linux.com dedicated an article to youtube-dl, which made it quite a popular program.