Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.

Agreed. Youtube downloaders are essential for backup purposes and for getting clips to put in your own videos as fair use. But people turning them in to fully user facing ad free frontends are driving the crackdown on the tools so we will end up with no way at all to download videos..

Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos while western tech companies pretty much universally block it.

YouTube downloaders have existed since the dawn of YouTube. And I really don't think they have jumped in popularity recently or anything.

They get shut down constantly if they become popular though.

yt-dlp is itself a fork of the (very popular) youtube-dl

youtube-dl just went largely dormant. There was a fiasco involving a unit test specifically downloading copyrighted content, but it was corrected. yt-dlp just became the more active fork.

Specifically testing the extra code needed to download certain videos - they didn't pick them just for the hell of it. It seemed unwise to have that in the public repo but I wouldn't describe it as a fiasco.