kj-youtube-dl 📼

this is really just made for me, but if you find it useful, feel free to use it.

i use the following shell aliases/abbreviations when i thought i was a cool dude using a terminal all day 🙄:

abbr -a yt-best "youtube-dl -cif 'bestvideo+bestaudio/best'"
abbr -a yt-m4a "youtube-dl -cif 'bestaudio[ext=m4a]'"
abbr -a yt-mp4 "youtube-dl -cif 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best'"
abbr -a yt-mpv "mpv --ytdl-format="
abbr -a yt-webm "youtube-dl -cif 'bestvideo[ext=webm]+bestaudio[ext=webm]/best[ext=webm]/best'"

now i’m sad and lazy, so i made a gui that i can just set a keybind to and pop the app open 😬

building

you need gtk3 and yt-dlp installed (mpv if you want streaming support)

then just:

make

the binary will end up in bin/kj-youtube-dl

using it

just run the binary:

./bin/kj-youtube-dl

paste a url, pick a format, click download.

that’s it

there’s no magic here — it just runs yt-dlp with the options you pick.

the magic is with yt-dlp and other tools i’m wrapping against.

i’m not the talent, they are.

links

• source code (GitHub)
• pre-built linux binary (amd64) (direct download)

what’s in the repo

• src/main.c - the entire app, probably badly written (i haven’t written c since high school)
• src/config.h - compile-time configuration (colors, sizes, etc.), wasn’t needed but maybe this will be cool someday
• src/config.mk - build configuration
• Makefile - standard suckless-style makefile

license

check the LICENSE file, it’s 0BSD for the most part.