iawia002/lux

Lux is a command-line video downloader written in Go that lets you save videos from many popular websites by simply passing a URL. The problem it solves is straightforward: video streaming sites do not provide a built-in download button, so if you want to save a video for offline viewing or archival, you need a tool that can extract the actual video stream from the page and download it to your disk. You run Lux from a terminal, give it a URL, and it fetches the video in the best available quality, showing you a progress bar as it downloads. You can also list all available quality options first (like 1080p, 720p, 480p) and then choose a specific one. It supports downloading entire playlists with a single command and can handle multiple URLs at once. If a download is interrupted, it can resume from where it left off. Under the hood, Lux parses the web page or video platform's API to extract the direct media stream URLs, then downloads the file segments. For videos that come in separate audio and video streams (common on platforms like YouTube), it uses FFmpeg, a separate, widely-used media processing tool, to merge them into a single final file. The tool supports a wide range of sites, with notable coverage of Chinese video platforms like Bilibili, iQIYI, and QQ Video, as well as more mainstream sites. It also supports proxy configuration and cookie-based authentication for accessing content that requires login. You would use Lux whenever you need a fast, no-frills command-line tool for video downloading on Windows, macOS, or Linux. It is written in Go and distributed as a single binary, installable via Homebrew, Scoop, or by downloading a prebuilt release.