arnecto/ytdlpgui

YtDlpGui is a simple graphical interface, built with C++ and Qt6, that sits on top of the popular command line tool yt-dlp. It lets you download video and audio from YouTube and other sites without typing terminal commands. The README is written in Ukrainian. Inside the app you can choose the quality you want, such as best mp4, best available format, or audio only as mp3, and you can also type in custom yt-dlp arguments directly if you need more control. You can pick a video codec preference too, including forcing conversion to H.264 for compatibility with editors like Adobe Premiere that struggle with the AV1 format YouTube often serves. It supports pulling browser cookies from Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi, or loading a cookies file, which is needed to get past YouTube's age restricted videos. There is also a progress bar with a live log, subtitle downloading, playlist support, and your settings are remembered between runs. Importantly, this program is only a GUI wrapper, it does not do the downloading itself. You need yt-dlp installed separately and its path pointed to in the app, plus ffmpeg for merging and converting audio and video. Node.js is also recommended, since modern YouTube sometimes requires running a small piece of JavaScript to get past its protections, and without it some videos may fail with an error about a failed challenge. A pre built Windows executable is available on the project's Releases page, so most users do not need to install Qt or a compiler themselves. Building from source requires Qt 6, CMake, and a C++17 compiler. The project is released under the GPL-3.0 license, and the author notes it does not host or distribute any video content itself, users are responsible for following YouTube's terms and their own country's copyright rules.