elsakane2015/ytbdowngui

YtbDownGUI is a desktop video downloader for macOS. Underneath it uses two well-known open-source tools, yt-dlp and ffmpeg, and wraps them in a graphical app built with Tauri version 2, which combines Rust on the backend with a React frontend. The README presents it as a personal-use utility and reminds users to only download content they have the right to access and to respect each site's terms of service. The main difference from other yt-dlp wrappers, according to the README, is a built-in login window. The app opens a small browser window inside itself where the user can log in to a target site as if they were in a regular browser. Once you log in, the app captures the session cookies and passes them to yt-dlp automatically, so you no longer need to export a cookies.txt file by hand. Sites listed as supported for this login flow include YouTube, Bilibili, X (Twitter), Tencent Video, Douyin, TikTok, and Pinterest, while public videos on the roughly thousand sites yt-dlp supports can still be downloaded as a guest. Features include single-video downloads with quality selection, batch downloads from playlists or channels with filters for date range and keywords, three-stage quality picking that lets you choose codec (H.264, VP9, or AV1), resolution up to 4K, audio codec, and container format. Subtitles can be saved as separate .srt files or burned into the video. The app bundles its own copies of yt-dlp 2026.03.17 and ffmpeg 7.1.1 so a friend installing it does not need any other tools, and it can check GitHub for a newer yt-dlp and update the bundled copy. The README walks through installing from a .dmg, including a one-time xattr command needed because the app uses ad-hoc signing rather than a paid Apple Developer certificate. It also shows how to build from source with Rust, Node, and pnpm, explains the version-number scheme with an auto-incrementing build number, and lists known limits: no DRM-protected content, occasional Google blocks on the embedded WebView login, and progress percentages that come from polling the partial download file rather than from yt-dlp's own output.