pixel-point/media-downloader

Media Downloader is a macOS app that lets you grab videos from the internet and trim them, all in one place. Instead of juggling a separate video downloader, a file browser, and a video editor, you paste a link from sites like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or X, and the app fetches the video, saves it as an MP4, and keeps a history of your downloads with thumbnail previews so you can find them again. Under the hood, the app relies on two well-established tools: one called yt-dlp that handles the actual downloading from thousands of websites, and another called ffmpeg that handles video conversion, merging, and trimming. The app acts as a clean, native macOS interface around these tools. It takes care of converting the downloaded files into broadly compatible MP4 format and stores your download history and preferences on your Mac. This is useful for creators, marketers, or anyone who frequently saves clips from social media. For example, a social media manager could download a video from a client's Instagram, trim it down to a specific clip within the app, and copy that trimmed clip directly to their clipboard to share or edit further. You can also reveal any downloaded file in Finder instantly or reopen the original source URL from the download history. The project is built entirely in Swift as a native Mac application, which means it looks and feels like a standard macOS app rather than a ported web window. It is designed to be straightforward to build from source for developers familiar with Mac development tools. One practical tradeoff worth noting is that the app's ability to download from specific sites depends on the underlying yt-dlp tool staying current. If a website changes how it serves video, the downloader could temporarily break until you update yt-dlp on your machine.