Downloader GUI

yt-dlg

If you've tried browsing the Internet recently without some form of ad blocking, it can be a real shock. There are pop-ups everywhere, invasive AI chats, endorsements inserted into text, site takeovers, slide-downs, slide-ins, and every other kind of invasive, attention-grabbing mechanic you can imagine. It's truly a sorry state because many great content sites – such as our own – obviously rely on advertising to fund the work they do, but the Wild West of click-throughs has broken any possible kind of compromise. Because most people don't run any kind of ad blocker, they must think the Internet is a very different kind of place than those of us who do, which perhaps explains why they may also be unconcerned about other aspects of the Internet, such as a lack of privacy or aggressive personal profile building to trick you into spending more time viewing and scrolling.

YouTube is becoming one of the worst sites for this, with both invasive advertising you can no longer skip and addictive further recommendations that can turn 30 seconds of research into 30 minutes on cats making beats. A decent blocker can help, and there are Firefox plugins that will also hide the recommendations, but another good alternative is to only watch the videos you want outside of YouTube's temptations. This is how the wonderful youtube-dl script has become so popular: by letting you access the often incredible content you find on YouTube without so much of YouTube. But it's a command line-only solution, and that leads us to this discovery, yt-dlg, a fully maintained and updated GUI for the command-line downloader that turns YouTube viewing into a simple drag-and-drop experience. The URL for your target is simply added to a list, where you can then see how much bandwidth it's taking and when it will be downloaded, allowing you to view it directly or from your favorite application.

Project Website

https://github.com/oleksis/youtube-dl-gui

Stack up URLs, see their ETAs, and limit your own viewing bandwidth with this excellent YouTube download GUI.

Profiler and monitor