8mo ago

I wrote a web front end for downloading Youtube videos, and i'd love some feedback

Hi everyone, I decided there simply were not enough docker apps for downloading Youtube videos, and so I made the situation worse :p

In all seriousness, I couldn't find one that fulfilled all my desires in a YT downloader, so I wrote my own in python using pytubefix and streamlit. It's still fairly rough, but it works, and i'd love to get your feedback. Installation is just a simple docker compose.

 yaml

    
services:
    pytube-gui:
        container_name: pytube-gui
        image: artisanbytecrafter/pytube-gui:develop
        ports:
            - 8501:8501
        volumes:
            - /path/to/downloads:/app/downloads # set to where you want downloads to go

Please let me know if you run into any issues, or have any feedback. I do still have a long list :)

Source code: https://codeberg.org/ArtisanByteCrafter/pytube-gui

37 comments

Would be nice if you could elaborate what exactly you did different than all the others?
Edit: jeez, guys. It was just a question since they said "none of the others met their needs" so I was interested in that? Did that sound that rude? I am not a native English speaker, so I am not sure now. They are completely OK to ignore my question. But cool, will not ask that again and ignore such posts in the future.
- You're ok, it's a fair question. The initial want arose from my son asking me to download YT videos for him to watch offline, and the various youtube-dl, yt-dlp, pytube, etc based solutions all being in various stages of broken, due to how youtube always changes things on their end. I chose an underlying library (pytubefix) that seems to be fast in updating when YT breaks things. Nothing in my app is revolutionary on never seen before, except maybe the ability to choose and combine the exact stream you want, i'm not sure. I took everything I liked in various solutions and put them together to work how i wanted. Then I though maybe someone else might like it too, so i shared it :) I work on it when i want to and just kinda go in the direction i want.
  
  Thank you! Also thanks for not getting discouraged to answer by all this comment mess.
- 0% of Rust smh
  
  I am a data scientist, so i know python i guess is my only answer lol. I do love rust as a consumer, but I'm definitely not a full scale programmer.
- Why is this always the top comment when somebody makes something with the same functionality as another service?
  It's just good there are some different options, maybe the UI is better, better tech stack, more responsive dev, who knows.
  
  In this particular case, OP said none of the others met their needs. I would like to know what new functionality this one has to know if it's something I'm interested in or not. It's not a critique - it's helping me understand if I want to check it out or not.
  
  Some people see "free stuff", and assume that it's now open season on wasting OP's time.
  It's a good way to kill any enthusiasm. Imagine your kid made a spaghetti portrait as a gift for you and instead of just accepting it you asked, "but what exactly did you do differently from all kids on the block?"
- Why? Why ask for this from the creator?
  If someone can create new software and offer it for free, they should not also be expected to also create a comprehensive analysis of what other people did and list of differences.
  Just take it or leave it, it's that simple. No need to act as if you're trying to waste some door-to-door salesman's time.
  Edit: I expected some downvotes but not that many.
  To my defense, the question in this thread is "you could elaborate what exactly you did different than all the others". Look, I'm not a native English speaker either but I feel we could agree that is still pretty far away from simply being curious about design choices or "what led you to create this" sort of exploratory question.
  I might have overreacted, though, so sorry for that.

While I'm not able to give it a try right now (just woke up, need to get ready for work...) I just wanna thank you for sharing your work and contributing to the community !!
It looks neat and simple :) !!!
- Thank you!

Works pretty good but basic error handling is missing. I made a issue and a PR for it already. My first try at streamlit.
- Thanks, looking over the PR now and testing it locally, should be good to merge very soon.
  
  About https://codeberg.org/ArtisanByteCrafter/pytube-gui/issues/7 Would it be ok if i try the playlist integration or do you want to do your things first?

I'll have to check this out. By any chance can you give it a Playlist and have it monitor it for changes and auto-download any new entries?
- yt-dlp supports downloading playlists. By using the --archive option it can save all downloaded video ID's into a text file and will only download videos which are not in that file.
  I wrote a docker container with a friend that uses that mechanism to auto download new videos every time it is triggered using cron. The configuration is a bit rough though and there is no gui so if this supports that part as well I might switch.
  
  I have some batch jobs on my windows machine that do it, so I guess I could go to the trouble of building my own container to run them, was just looking for an easy way out ;)
- Playlist support is on the roadmap. I want to make sure existing functionality is solid first, and then i'd like to include this feature. There's an issue in the tracker for it too.
  
  Excellent, we will watch your career with great interest! ;)
- you might be interested in pinchflat or tubearchivest which are made for this task
- That's a great idea. YouTube doesn't have RSS feeds, does it?
  
  Not outright displayed but you can find them in the source code.

I decided there simply were not enough docker apps for downloading Youtube videos, and so I made the situation worse :p
You get my upvote for this alone!

Is it possible to submit a channel and download all the videos (also new videos when they are released).
- TubeArchivist sounds like a better fit for that.
  
  A simple cron job with youtube-dl works also fine.
  Edit: But thanks for your suggestion! I'll take a look
  Edit 2: TubeArchivist looks nice, but way over my personal needs. Also, its performance requirements are quite high for my small server (4 Cores, 4 GB RAM). I'll keep my small, scripted solution (yt-dl + store to nextcloud folders).
- I have playlist support now, but that's all so far.

I use Seal on Android and yt-dlp-gui on Linux because they're native apps using native theming/design languages, but it's always cool to have another option!
- +1 for yt-dlp

<just some UI feedback from gleaning the screen shot> - looks clean enough - apparently contextual help, I like those - tables love to be sortable (maybe the table is already sortable, please indicate (🔺🔻)) - the location of the 'download' button is somewhat random and it doesn't need an extra border, the color is more than enough for it to stand out - this also affects the order of screen reading/information intake
- Thank you! The tables are indeed sortable by clicking the column headers. I do this with the underlying streamlit dataframe, I don't believe they support styling the columns, but i'm not 100% sure. Feedback noted on the download button, the border is a remnant of a form submission that gradually got removed so now it's just a form of one button. One of my chief goals was to avoid scrolling as much as possible.

I like the [Max Quality] option. Much fancy, very wow.

Looks interesting! Might give it a go later to check it out.

Idea for an unrelated browser extension:
Add like 5-6 reccomended videos with similar tags for a platform other than YT to the top of YT Reccomendations.
For people who want to spend less time on YT but dont want to spend more time searching.

This is awesome—thanks for sharing your project! I totally get the struggle of finding a YouTube downloader that checks all the boxes, so it’s great to see someone building a solution that’s easy to deploy with Docker and has a user-friendly interface.
One feature I’d personally love to see is transcript support. Being able to download not just the video, but also the YouTube transcript (or even auto-generate one for videos without captions) would be super useful for people who want to archive or search video content. Maybe integration with something like Transcriptly or OpenAI’s Whisper could be an interesting addition down the line.
Anyway, thanks again for making this open source! I’ll give it a try. Looking forward to seeing how this project evolves!

Wow, thank you kind sir 😊

37 comments