9 ms·

Youtube-dlc – Download videos from YouTube or other video platforms

199 points by theidel 6y ago

lbeltrame 6y ago
The repository provides no reasons that brought the need for a fork. Can someone provide additional information?
- theidel 6y ago
  This is something I was going to address but wasn't my main focus in the beginning. But I made another write-up on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ir8ic6/youtubedlc_an_active_fork_of_youtubedl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ir8ic6/youtube... A tiny conversation about this here as well https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc/issues/56#issuecomment-691440131 https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc/issues/56#issue...
  - mumblerino 6y ago
    This feels like when I review incomprehensible code on GitHub: Mention. it. in. the. code. Adding a comment here and on Reddit is useless if nobody else sees it. Explaining why a fork exists should be the first thing people read, especially how “everything is a fork” on GitHub.
    - theidel 6y ago
      I second that. But yes you are right it's my fault that I haven't done that already. Be assured that I will include some information regarding what you said in the readme.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- theon144 6y ago
  https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
outadoc 6y ago
Isn’t youtube-dl already updated all the time to keep up with scraping changes? I don’t understand why this would claim to be more maintained?
- capableweb 6y ago
  Seems to have been originally spawned from this discussion: "Youtube-dl is dying?" https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 citing many PRs are not getting merged. Anecdote: youtube-dl still works for all the sites I'm using it for.
  - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
    I maintain several open source projects. Sometimes PR are not merged for years. I'm not payed for this, I'm not even thanked for this most of the time, so I'm certainly not going to set any deadline. But forking might be a solution, if you can give the necessary horse power for the long run. Most can't.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      It’s odd to me how nontechnical people have migrated to GitHub to make bug reports on software they use. The other day, I was trying to use a Python library to scrape some stuff. It kept breaking. I looked on the issues page and there were many, essentially useless bug reports asking them to fix the issue. I opened up the script and changed about 7 lines and it worked fine.
      - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
        Well, they look for a channel to communicate their frustration. Most are closed. This one is open. The water follows the path of least resistance.
      - chucky 6y ago
        There are two factors at play here I think. The first is that Github has become quite popular. The second is that Github has worked a lot on usability - it's now very easy for users who are not very technical to create an account and report issues. At times I imagine there could be some kind of "I know how to report bugs"-certification that people could somehow earn. Projects could then use this as a barrier to prevent getting too many useless issue reports. The problem really goes both ways - as a software dev I'm disincentivized to report detailed bugs to projects, because there's a high risk it will get drowned out in the noise. Some projects have quite specific templates for reporting issues. This helps a bit, but you still need someone to go in and remove issues that don't match the template, and few people want to volunteer for that work.
kairumination0 6y ago
As a casual end user of youtube-dl, I find that as long as I keep it up-to-date it is highly reliable and meets all my needs on every O.S.
- mercer 6y ago
  I built a web app that is basically a wrapper around youtube-dl. By default it downloads and audio version that I can then just open with VLC on my Android phone and listen to in the background. It's incredible how many links I can just throw at it, and things just work. Every once in a while I need to update the binary, but I can't blame that on youtube-dl.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dewey 6y ago
YouTube-dl as a name is already confusing enough because it works for so many sites and YouTube is just one of them. Why complicate it even further in your fork by renaming it to YouTube-dlc (The "c" stands for community I guess) when dlc already stands for so many other things.
- theon144 6y ago
  I assume it's going to be hard enough for the community to know about this fork in the first place, signaling direct continuity is definitely a reason to name the fork so similarly. Besides, Mozilla has nothing to do with Mosaic, XBMC had nothing to do with Xbox for years...
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    Incidentally, XBMC has since rebranded as "Kodi" a fee years back.
- dmos62 6y ago
  Seconded. "youtube-dlc" might give an initial brand recognition boost from being similar to "youtube-dl", but it's the community that will make it or break it. Giving it a bad name (as argued by parent comment, and I agree) is not a good start.
- theidel 6y ago
  I agree. Tho my main intention was backwards compatibility so that changes can easily be merged back into main project. There are also lots of people using it in their python projects. The naming discussion comes up every now and then as an issue. So for now I would like the name youtube-dlc to stay. But depending on how things go in the future I may change the name.
  - account42 6y ago
    The name makes it seem more like you are attempting a hostile takeover of the project branding. Definitely not a great way to go about this.
zo1 6y ago
I fully support this. I know it's hard for maintainers to do stuff for free and people request too much at times. But it appears that the attitude of the original maintainers of this project are actively "hostile" and they're not willing to accept the help from additional maintainers that have contributed fixes and testing. So a fork was in order, for sure. And from the look of the comments on the issues on the fork, it seems that people are happy with the continuity and effort that is being put into the fork. Open source can be downright hostile and unpleasant at times, so I can definitely understand the frustration. All sorts of shenanigans happen constantly.
- theidel 6y ago
  Yes it's stressing and time demanding. But you are absolutely right about how the maintainers treat other people. At least it is open source. There are quite some closed-source projects that ran into troubles and basically disappeared. I am not sure how they will react since the fork gained some attention now. However it's not my intention to let them look bad in any kind or act like I am better. All I want is a working solution where contributions by the community are acknowledged. But my attempt to openly point that out (issue youtube-dl dying?) basically got ignored and closed.
dannyw 6y ago
Fantastic. This is the beauty of open source. `youtube-dl` has had quite a number of breaking issues, where fully working PRs were raised and tested but not merged for weeks and with no communication. I am glad to see `youtube-dlc`. Please, support the self updater as well (if it is not supported already). For my archival servers, I have a cron job that updates every day, I hope I can do that with youtube-dlc too.
- theidel 6y ago
  Yes that is exact one of the reasons why I created this fork. The self updater should hopefully work in a future release. To be honest I haven't dealt with that yet. But feel free to open an issue so it's on my TODO-list.
0-_-0 6y ago
A GUI-based alternative is JDownloader
- trzeci 6y ago
  I was also using JDownloader mostly, but looks that this comment isn't popular. Is there something about JDownloader that I'm missing?
  - jrimbault 6y ago
    It's not exactly the same category of software. It's a download manager, not a video extractor/scrapper.
    - trzeci 6y ago
      Thanks!
    - forgotpwd16 6y ago
      It should be noted though that it has a fairly powerful built-in scrapper supporting video download from numerous sites. Unfortunately checking the code it seems to be closely integrated to the rest of the program, so someone cannot make (easily) a console utility based on it.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    It's dodgy software. It got acquired and got some spyware/adware/toolbars embedded. Don't trust. Personally, I removed the older version I had, fearing it would auto upgrade and auto install malware. It's a download manager for shared hosting sites, mostly used for downloading movies/shows/games. It can get videos from youtube, dailymotion and a hundred sites but it's not the main purpose. Users are willing to try anything to get their latest tv show, there is too much money in bundling adware to ignore. The software was great once upon a time, then it got popular, eventually the author sold out.
    - 0-_-0 6y ago
wodenokoto 6y ago
Does curb geoblocking?
kzrdude 6y ago
Youtube-dl seems to be widely used behind the scenes, for example in Mpv, right? This wasn't obvious from using mpv.
- liability 6y ago
  Yes mpv uses youtube-dl via the builtin ytdl_hook.lua script. https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/player/lua/ytdl_hook.lua https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/player/lua/ytd...
brailsafe 6y ago
Seems like this is derived from a dissatisfaction with maintenance, but all I'm seeing is that they're maintaining things just fine. Yes, there are a lot of open PRs, but there are also quite a few merged, reviewed, and closed PRs. While I do support forks in the spirit of FOSS, I disagree that YT-dl is being poorly maintained and find that it continues to work well for my needs. To the person who started the fork, what happened when you inquired about the apparent problem via email?
- theidel 6y ago
  I wrote an email to all three core maintainers (one of them even twice) and to some of the inactive maintainers. There was no reply at all. However one reacted on github where I addressed the maintaining issues but basically just ignored it and all those who had similar concerns. Well I am not the only one being frustrated about how things go. Especially the lack of communication. It's basically non-existent. At least the PRs that are merged are mostly either adult related or youtube. If your site is not even known to the maintainer - good luck. That will never be merged tho it may be one of the biggest sites in asia or so.
noxer 6y ago
One tool that does everything. Its literally backwards. It eventually always results in one tool that's constantly broken. There should be a tool for each site if there is a maintainer who actually cares about that site.
- ldarby 6y ago
  This is misapplying the unix philosophy. There would be too much duplicated functionality between different tools for different sites. It would be like having different versions of /bin/ls for different file systems.
  - ldarby 6y ago
    To follow on, it's a valid point though. /bin/ls can handle different file systems because many other separate people/projects are responsible for the file system specific support (in the kernel). Youtube-dl should be architected to allow many other people to own the site-specific support (i.e. via a plugin system, with the main "distro" of yt-dl including some popular plugins, which other people or themselves are responsible for), if it was like that then probably this fork wouldn't be necessary.
    - theidel 6y ago
      Yes that is a good point. The architecture is not fully suited to the current situation. There is actually already a base structure so it would only need the plugin system which pulls the missing extractors/downloader on the fly. Tho I may see problems here when it comes to windows binaries. Another advantage would be to easier maintain those extractors as well as all issues that arise around specific ones. So no more thousands of issues addressing different extractors in one project.
  - noxer 6y ago
    "too much duplicated functionality" What should that be? Who decides when its too much anyway? No one cares about duplicated functionality in stuff they don't use. Probably 90% only want to download form YouTube. So why would they care if part of the code is used in another downloaders they don't use. If you create a kernel/OS/Distro sure you don't want duplicated functions but this is just a downloader tool. Also if there are generic functions that can be used by different tools you create a lib. No one has to reinvent the wheel. Would it cause more work if summed up? Yes most likely but the work is shared and independent.
jzer0cool 6y ago
Anyone know of an existing online version of this (or another website)?
- theidel 6y ago
  there are actually quite a few that uses youtube-dl. So far I don't know if anyone uses youtube-dlc. But I already got two messages that they want to build a webapp/service using youtube-dlc.
dxxvi 6y ago
I'm having issues with youtube-dl and udemy (althought the Internet says it's possible. If anyone has some tip, I'll be very grateful). Does this one work with udemy?
- ahmedalsudani 6y ago
  Why not try it yourself? It’s pretty easy to clone the repo :)
- ericol 6y ago
  Try Udeler [1]. For me it has worked flawlessly since I started using it. [1] https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-gui https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-gui
exabrial 6y ago
The first rule of YouTube DL is you don't talk about YouTube DL
stjohnswarts 6y ago
One of my favorite pieces of software :) . It definitely comes in handy when you really need to get that video
rosstex 6y ago
The main issue I've found with youtube-dl is that "best" quality doesn't actually download the best video + audio in all cases, and might take a manual override. Not sure if youtube-dlc fixes this.
- theidel 6y ago
  Nope. Maybe there is someone with a fix which can be merged. So far most people filter formats to their needs but that's not an option for basic users I guess..
pipdip 6y ago
Sadly this piracy tool is written in python - a major security risk.
ftjyefyjw 6y ago
Windows Defender flags the exe as a Trojan.

199 points by theidel 6y ago

lbeltrame 6y ago

The repository provides no reasons that brought the need for a fork. Can someone provide additional information?

theidel 6y ago
This is something I was going to address but wasn't my main focus in the beginning. But I made another write-up on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ir8ic6/youtubedlc_an_active_fork_of_youtubedl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ir8ic6/youtube... A tiny conversation about this here as well https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc/issues/56#issuecomment-691440131 https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc/issues/56#issue...
- mumblerino 6y ago
  This feels like when I review incomprehensible code on GitHub: Mention. it. in. the. code. Adding a comment here and on Reddit is useless if nobody else sees it. Explaining why a fork exists should be the first thing people read, especially how “everything is a fork” on GitHub.
  - theidel 6y ago
    I second that. But yes you are right it's my fault that I haven't done that already. Be assured that I will include some information regarding what you said in the readme.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
theon144 6y ago
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

outadoc 6y ago

Isn’t youtube-dl already updated all the time to keep up with scraping changes? I don’t understand why this would claim to be more maintained?

capableweb 6y ago
Seems to have been originally spawned from this discussion: "Youtube-dl is dying?" https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 citing many PRs are not getting merged. Anecdote: youtube-dl still works for all the sites I'm using it for.
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  I maintain several open source projects. Sometimes PR are not merged for years. I'm not payed for this, I'm not even thanked for this most of the time, so I'm certainly not going to set any deadline. But forking might be a solution, if you can give the necessary horse power for the long run. Most can't.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    It’s odd to me how nontechnical people have migrated to GitHub to make bug reports on software they use. The other day, I was trying to use a Python library to scrape some stuff. It kept breaking. I looked on the issues page and there were many, essentially useless bug reports asking them to fix the issue. I opened up the script and changed about 7 lines and it worked fine.
    - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
      Well, they look for a channel to communicate their frustration. Most are closed. This one is open. The water follows the path of least resistance.
    - chucky 6y ago
      There are two factors at play here I think. The first is that Github has become quite popular. The second is that Github has worked a lot on usability - it's now very easy for users who are not very technical to create an account and report issues. At times I imagine there could be some kind of "I know how to report bugs"-certification that people could somehow earn. Projects could then use this as a barrier to prevent getting too many useless issue reports. The problem really goes both ways - as a software dev I'm disincentivized to report detailed bugs to projects, because there's a high risk it will get drowned out in the noise. Some projects have quite specific templates for reporting issues. This helps a bit, but you still need someone to go in and remove issues that don't match the template, and few people want to volunteer for that work.

kairumination0 6y ago

As a casual end user of youtube-dl, I find that as long as I keep it up-to-date it is highly reliable and meets all my needs on every O.S.

mercer 6y ago
I built a web app that is basically a wrapper around youtube-dl. By default it downloads and audio version that I can then just open with VLC on my Android phone and listen to in the background. It's incredible how many links I can just throw at it, and things just work. Every once in a while I need to update the binary, but I can't blame that on youtube-dl.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dewey 6y ago

YouTube-dl as a name is already confusing enough because it works for so many sites and YouTube is just one of them. Why complicate it even further in your fork by renaming it to YouTube-dlc (The "c" stands for community I guess) when dlc already stands for so many other things.

theon144 6y ago
I assume it's going to be hard enough for the community to know about this fork in the first place, signaling direct continuity is definitely a reason to name the fork so similarly. Besides, Mozilla has nothing to do with Mosaic, XBMC had nothing to do with Xbox for years...
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  Incidentally, XBMC has since rebranded as "Kodi" a fee years back.
dmos62 6y ago
Seconded. "youtube-dlc" might give an initial brand recognition boost from being similar to "youtube-dl", but it's the community that will make it or break it. Giving it a bad name (as argued by parent comment, and I agree) is not a good start.
theidel 6y ago
I agree. Tho my main intention was backwards compatibility so that changes can easily be merged back into main project. There are also lots of people using it in their python projects. The naming discussion comes up every now and then as an issue. So for now I would like the name youtube-dlc to stay. But depending on how things go in the future I may change the name.
- account42 6y ago
  The name makes it seem more like you are attempting a hostile takeover of the project branding. Definitely not a great way to go about this.

zo1 6y ago

I fully support this. I know it's hard for maintainers to do stuff for free and people request too much at times. But it appears that the attitude of the original maintainers of this project are actively "hostile" and they're not willing to accept the help from additional maintainers that have contributed fixes and testing. So a fork was in order, for sure. And from the look of the comments on the issues on the fork, it seems that people are happy with the continuity and effort that is being put into the fork. Open source can be downright hostile and unpleasant at times, so I can definitely understand the frustration. All sorts of shenanigans happen constantly.

theidel 6y ago
Yes it's stressing and time demanding. But you are absolutely right about how the maintainers treat other people. At least it is open source. There are quite some closed-source projects that ran into troubles and basically disappeared. I am not sure how they will react since the fork gained some attention now. However it's not my intention to let them look bad in any kind or act like I am better. All I want is a working solution where contributions by the community are acknowledged. But my attempt to openly point that out (issue youtube-dl dying?) basically got ignored and closed.

dannyw 6y ago

Fantastic. This is the beauty of open source. `youtube-dl` has had quite a number of breaking issues, where fully working PRs were raised and tested but not merged for weeks and with no communication. I am glad to see `youtube-dlc`. Please, support the self updater as well (if it is not supported already). For my archival servers, I have a cron job that updates every day, I hope I can do that with youtube-dlc too.

theidel 6y ago
Yes that is exact one of the reasons why I created this fork. The self updater should hopefully work in a future release. To be honest I haven't dealt with that yet. But feel free to open an issue so it's on my TODO-list.

0-_-0 6y ago

A GUI-based alternative is JDownloader

trzeci 6y ago
I was also using JDownloader mostly, but looks that this comment isn't popular. Is there something about JDownloader that I'm missing?
- jrimbault 6y ago
  It's not exactly the same category of software. It's a download manager, not a video extractor/scrapper.
  - trzeci 6y ago
    Thanks!
  - forgotpwd16 6y ago
    It should be noted though that it has a fairly powerful built-in scrapper supporting video download from numerous sites. Unfortunately checking the code it seems to be closely integrated to the rest of the program, so someone cannot make (easily) a console utility based on it.
- user5994461 6y ago
  It's dodgy software. It got acquired and got some spyware/adware/toolbars embedded. Don't trust. Personally, I removed the older version I had, fearing it would auto upgrade and auto install malware. It's a download manager for shared hosting sites, mostly used for downloading movies/shows/games. It can get videos from youtube, dailymotion and a hundred sites but it's not the main purpose. Users are willing to try anything to get their latest tv show, there is too much money in bundling adware to ignore. The software was great once upon a time, then it got popular, eventually the author sold out.
  - 0-_-0 6y ago

wodenokoto 6y ago

Does curb geoblocking?

kzrdude 6y ago

Youtube-dl seems to be widely used behind the scenes, for example in Mpv, right? This wasn't obvious from using mpv.

liability 6y ago
Yes mpv uses youtube-dl via the builtin ytdl_hook.lua script. https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/player/lua/ytdl_hook.lua https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/player/lua/ytd...

brailsafe 6y ago

Seems like this is derived from a dissatisfaction with maintenance, but all I'm seeing is that they're maintaining things just fine. Yes, there are a lot of open PRs, but there are also quite a few merged, reviewed, and closed PRs. While I do support forks in the spirit of FOSS, I disagree that YT-dl is being poorly maintained and find that it continues to work well for my needs. To the person who started the fork, what happened when you inquired about the apparent problem via email?

theidel 6y ago
I wrote an email to all three core maintainers (one of them even twice) and to some of the inactive maintainers. There was no reply at all. However one reacted on github where I addressed the maintaining issues but basically just ignored it and all those who had similar concerns. Well I am not the only one being frustrated about how things go. Especially the lack of communication. It's basically non-existent. At least the PRs that are merged are mostly either adult related or youtube. If your site is not even known to the maintainer - good luck. That will never be merged tho it may be one of the biggest sites in asia or so.

noxer 6y ago

One tool that does everything. Its literally backwards. It eventually always results in one tool that's constantly broken. There should be a tool for each site if there is a maintainer who actually cares about that site.

ldarby 6y ago
This is misapplying the unix philosophy. There would be too much duplicated functionality between different tools for different sites. It would be like having different versions of /bin/ls for different file systems.
- ldarby 6y ago
  To follow on, it's a valid point though. /bin/ls can handle different file systems because many other separate people/projects are responsible for the file system specific support (in the kernel). Youtube-dl should be architected to allow many other people to own the site-specific support (i.e. via a plugin system, with the main "distro" of yt-dl including some popular plugins, which other people or themselves are responsible for), if it was like that then probably this fork wouldn't be necessary.
  - theidel 6y ago
    Yes that is a good point. The architecture is not fully suited to the current situation. There is actually already a base structure so it would only need the plugin system which pulls the missing extractors/downloader on the fly. Tho I may see problems here when it comes to windows binaries. Another advantage would be to easier maintain those extractors as well as all issues that arise around specific ones. So no more thousands of issues addressing different extractors in one project.
- noxer 6y ago
  "too much duplicated functionality" What should that be? Who decides when its too much anyway? No one cares about duplicated functionality in stuff they don't use. Probably 90% only want to download form YouTube. So why would they care if part of the code is used in another downloaders they don't use. If you create a kernel/OS/Distro sure you don't want duplicated functions but this is just a downloader tool. Also if there are generic functions that can be used by different tools you create a lib. No one has to reinvent the wheel. Would it cause more work if summed up? Yes most likely but the work is shared and independent.

jzer0cool 6y ago

Anyone know of an existing online version of this (or another website)?

theidel 6y ago
there are actually quite a few that uses youtube-dl. So far I don't know if anyone uses youtube-dlc. But I already got two messages that they want to build a webapp/service using youtube-dlc.

dxxvi 6y ago

I'm having issues with youtube-dl and udemy (althought the Internet says it's possible. If anyone has some tip, I'll be very grateful). Does this one work with udemy?

ahmedalsudani 6y ago
Why not try it yourself? It’s pretty easy to clone the repo :)
ericol 6y ago
Try Udeler [1]. For me it has worked flawlessly since I started using it. [1] https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-gui https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-gui

exabrial 6y ago

The first rule of YouTube DL is you don't talk about YouTube DL

stjohnswarts 6y ago

One of my favorite pieces of software :) . It definitely comes in handy when you really need to get that video

rosstex 6y ago

The main issue I've found with youtube-dl is that "best" quality doesn't actually download the best video + audio in all cases, and might take a manual override. Not sure if youtube-dlc fixes this.

theidel 6y ago
Nope. Maybe there is someone with a fix which can be merged. So far most people filter formats to their needs but that's not an option for basic users I guess..

pipdip 6y ago

Sadly this piracy tool is written in python - a major security risk.

ftjyefyjw 6y ago

Windows Defender flags the exe as a Trojan.