[guycook]

The tragedy of this software (and many like it) is that despite working exactly as advertised, easily and with a lot of features, because it's a quiet open source project without any SEO rigging it will never appear in page 1 of any searches by laymen trying to download videos ("save youtube to hard drive", "download youtube videos" et al).

The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs just because they wanted to save a video is ridiculous.

[baldfat]

I treat youtube-dl like Fight Club. I am glad it isn't on the top of searches since I am afraid sites would start trying to stop it from working harder.

[dexterdog]

They already do. That's why it updates pretty much every time I do a homebrew update.

[baldfat]

I should have said. They would try harder.

[rpgmaker]

I don't know what parent is talking about, this script it's already very popular. I found it years ago and it wasn't difficult to find on google. Something worth mentioning is that the script works with dozens and dozens of video sites (or just sites with regular video content). Almost any video you throw at it gets downloaded. When something breaks it's usually fixed within days. It's a great piece of work.

[haddr]

I hope you haven't voted this article then. Let's keep it secret ;)

[samstave]

Exactly!

SHHH - dont talk about ytdl...

obv if the masses start talking about things like this, then sites like YT will go on the attack. WE DO NOT WANT THIS.

[clapinton]

My Maslow's middle layer immediately filled up when I read this. Thanks for making my Monday better.

[Houshalter]

I think most video download sites use youtube-dl on the backend so they should already be doing that.

[ProfOak_]

I found this neat project that adds a GUI to YouTube-dl. It looks like an easy program for non-technical people to use.

https://github.com/MrS0m30n3/youtube-dl-gui

[masklinn]

guycook's lament is about the findability of the project for laypeople, not about its interface. The interface is not an issue when laypeople can't find the project in the first place.

[Houshalter]

Well the reason it has a bad ranking is because it isn't accessible to lay people. People might click the link and say "how do I install pip? Whats a PATH variable?" (or even "What's a command line?") and click back to the search page. Google counts that as a vote against that site, hence the bad ranking.

[giancarlostoro]

I never knew this occurred, how do they do this if I open links in a new tab? Maybe if the website uses Google Analytics they might take this into account, but if they didn't have any other software from Google? I'm quite intrigued. Thanks for that post!

[Houshalter]

I think just clicking the link and then clicking a different link counts against the first link. It probably doesn't matter if you actually use the back button or not.

I don't know how they account for people clicking multiple links in new tabs. My guess is they reorder links sometimes so that users that click multiple links cancel each other out. They just try to maximize the probability you will click on a link and not come back to the search page.

[tokenizerrr]

Well, I guess I cause a LOT of bad rankings for sites. I tend to just open a lot of results in different tabs, then go through them one by one.

[dangoldin]

They might also look at the timestamp between the clicks. If they're all together they might realize it's just someone opening multiple tabs at once. If they're a few minutes apart that may mean something else.

[throwaway7767]

Do you have any reference to confirm that google does this? I really doubt it would be a useful heuristic, as just because someone opens another search result does not mean the first one was not valuable.

Not saying they don't, but it seems unlikely and I'd be curious to know if this can be confirmed.

[jccalhoun]

another good gui is this web-based one: http://www.alltubedownload.net/

[mti27]

The pafy python add-in library is good too, although it is command-line it's really easy and well-documented.

http://pythonhosted.org/Pafy/

[johnchristopher]

Oh, nice find ! There's even a windows version.

edit: with an installer ! And the application updates youtube-dl to the last version. Very nice.

[elzi]

I had to resolve a dependency before the installation worked (wxPython) on OSX. Worked via `brew install wxpython`

[ekianjo]

You dont need a gui at all gor youtube-dl. Its sufficiently explicit.

[reedlaw]

I don't think it's a tragedy because if it was very popular and easy to use YouTube would likely block it. It's directly competing with their own YouTube Red. Also look at popular Linux distros like Ubuntu. As soon as they reach mass market they lose what made them special to begin with and start experimenting with advertising and so on.

[throwaway7767]

> Also look at popular Linux distros like Ubuntu. As soon as they reach mass market they lose what made them special to begin with and start experimenting with advertising and so on.

Well, ubuntu is a company. It was always their intention to become profitable at some point, even if they were willing to operate at a loss to build their market.

I very much doubt debian would go the same way if it got the same level of publicity, for example. But then, as the GP said, it's unlikely to happen because they're a community project without a marketing budget.

[morganvachon]

> Well, ubuntu is a company.

A minor nitpick: Canonical is a company, Ubuntu is their (main) product.

[reedlaw]

What made Ubuntu special was making Linux and other free software easier to use. But when it became too easy they started to take away the "free" part by adding intrusive "features". It's was never a given that as a company they would try to make money that way.

[Kristine1975]

Is it really possible to block youtube-dl? All it does is the same thing Youtube's own HMTL5 player does, except that it saves the video instead of playing it back.

[throwaway7767]

They can change their site around enough to make it not worth the effort to maintain the tool. But it's always a cat-and-mouse game.

[lelandbatey]

It isn't quite possible to block youtube-dl but not other ways of accessing YouTube. However, if you're downloading a lot of videos from one IP address, Google will blobk your IP from accessing YouTube. I know this because it happened to me after I ran a service to allow people to make gifs from YouTube videos, and the way I got them was with youtube-dl. After a while (about two years) they blacklisted my IP.

[nsgi]

Once every two years isn't a bad failure rate. Easy to get another one.

[baldfat]

Certain videos will download without audio then I update youtube-dl and that usually fixes it.

[undersuit]

Youtube could always switch to using EME. Then they get to lock down all unauthorized players. Serve some low res videos un-DRMed to continue allowing embedding.

[cookiecaper]

Yes. It's called a cease and desist.

[MrBra]

From https://www.quora.com/Is-downloading-YouTube-videos-legal/an...

Downloading from YouTube is in most cases not illegal - it could be considered time-shifting for personal consumption, in some cases fair use, both of which are legal in US. In some cases though - like downloading the movies that are paid or videos with limited distributions and not available in the States, could be considered copyright infringement.

What downloading does though is break YouTube's Terms of Service. Even though some courts already stated explicitly that breaking Terms of Service is not illegal, doing so might still get you in trouble in civil court, as you are breaking an agreement between yourself and the company services of which you are using.

If you would be using YouTube APIs for your product, they would probably suspend your access if they wouldn't like your product, so something to consider.

Is it ok to download the videos for offline viewing? Your choice - might not be illegal, but not 'ok' from YouTube's point of view.

Doesn't youtube lose out on advertising revenue this way? Yes - that's is precisely the reason for the rule :)

The big unknown here is that the issue has not been presented in US courts yet, at least as far as I know, so there is no precedent.

Hope it helps.

--------------

Also check http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/internet/is-it-legal-downl...

--------------

Also check http://lifehacker.com/5901773/breaking-a-terms-of-service-is...

[cookiecaper]

Unless his attorneys are going to go up against YouTube's attorneys and drag this through to the Supreme Court (that is, unless he has a few million dollars sitting around earmarked for his lawyer), it can and will be stopped by a cease and desist. If YouTube sued him, they'd probably get an injunction preventing him from distributing youtube-dl until the case was resolved.

Even if it were litigated all the way up to SCOTUS, there is no guarantee that the Supremes would see a video downloading device the same way they see a video recording device (and the ruling that stated home recording was fair use, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc (colloquially, the "Betamax case"), was itself a controversial 5-4 ruling) instead of the way they see a peer-to-peer distribution network like Napster.

There are many spurious C&Ds sent to people for violations of the CFAA based upon a site's Terms of Use each year; big companies squashing competitors they dislike, or even non-competitors that embarrass the company by providing a service that they've as yet been unable to figure out, etc. The argument that violation of the Terms of Use constitutes unauthorized access under the CFAA has prevailed in court multiple times, and even if it hadn't, once a C&D is received, the authorization is at that point certainly revoked and thus, continued access equates to a violation of the CFAA.

There are copyright and trademark issues here too, even if you can prevail on the CFAA issues (not likely). Judges have ruled that downloading a webpage into RAM in order to extract non-copyrightable data is copyright infringement, because the momentary existence of the entire page in RAM is an unauthorized copy.

Various counterarguments that shift the blame to the consumer, e.g., "we don't actually talk to YouTube's server, we just take a URL that the customer submits via the extension and convert it to another URL, and that doesn't involve accessing YouTube's servers", usually fail (though logically extension developers shouldn't be any more liable than browser developers for their customers' use). One could be considered a conspirator or an accessory to CFAA violations.

So, yes, it could and would be stopped by a C&D unless Richard Branson or some other megamillionaire is secretly bankrolling youtube-dl, and even then, its chances of surviving the legal battle unscathed are pretty slim.

Similar considerations apply to something like PriceZombie, which Amazon just shut down because it doesn't like what the data reveals. The legal situation here is a seriously understated social problem.

You may read this and say it sounds like web crawlers like Google are illegal. Well, yes, they are. The difference is that Google was able to hit critical mass before such a devastating lawsuit was brought, and now they're effectively too big to sue out of existence. If you are making an internet company or product, you have to hope this happens to you before you make someone mad and get sued to death.

[at-fates-hands]

I've started to become more and more disgruntled with search engines in general. Yeah, if I want to find something obvious, I'll find it.

But what about mildly obscure software like this? This is something I would completely use, but have no way to find it. There's so many tools out there which are totally awesome, but wilting away because you can't find it in the search engines.

As much as I love technology, it still seems the best stuff is usually found through the old tried and true methodologies. Word of mouth, conferences, or from friends or other developers.

[jmnicolas]

Your family members would use a command line app ?

[guycook]

If they knew about it, sure. All it would take is a 3 step (after initial download) instructional with some screenshots:

1. Open Explorer where you downloaded youtube-dl

2. Shift+Right click -> Open command window here

3. Type 'youtube-dl <space>' and paste url[0], then enter

As I said it really is a discoverability problem, one that the organiser of the world's information is neither incentivised nor really expected to address.

[0] ok, this is a pain pre Win 10, but ^V is supported now

[Houshalter]

I happen to be on a fresh copy of Windows 7 right now, so I'm going to try it. I expect to encounter at least several steps where a nontechnical user would be totally lost or frustrated.

1. Download Python 2.7 and install. Encountered error where the installer stopped with no indication that it had completed or failed. Tried to install again and it messed up the original installer which was hiding in the background and it failed.

2. Downloaded the YouTube-dl.exe. Running it does nothing. Youtube-dl gives no instructions on how to install.

3. Reading the documentation of youtube-dl, installation instruction is just "place it in their home directory or any other location on their PATH."

4. Google about PATH variables and home directories... I wouldn't expect a nontechnical user to get past this step.

5. Add C:\Python27 to the Path variable.

6. Drop youtube-dl.exe into C:\Python27.

7. Start Powershell. Doubt a nontechnical user would know how to do this, but whatever.

8. Figure out how to format a command to youtube-dl. Reading through the documentation is kind of confusing at first, but I will just copy a command from this HN thread.

9. Paste "youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 dQw4w9WgXcQ" into powershell. As you mentioned yourself, something a nontechnical user would have trouble doing since control-v is disabled.

10. "ERROR: ffprobe or avprobe not found. Please install one." So Google how to install ffprobe.

11. First link links to another page, which has a long 14 step guide asking me to figure out how to install PHP before I even start, so I'm just giving up here, 30 minutes in.

Sadly I didn't even get to the "it's working but I don't know where it's saving the files to" issue.

[ptman]

"We also provide a Windows executable that includes Python."

I read this as not having to install python for it to work.

I think some powershell commands that have required arguments start interactively prompting the user for values for those arguments if they aren't specified on the command line. That would probably work:

1. Download youtube-dl.exe

2. double-click

3. youtube-dl.exe notices the lack of url as argument and prompts:

URL:

4. paste URL and hit enter

5. Progress bar of download (?)

[Houshalter]

That may be correct, but the download page explicitly says "Remember youtube-dl requires Python version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+ to work." and links to python's website. I tried renaming Python.exe and it still worked, so I have no idea what's up with it.

[yohui]

youtube-dl.exe does not need a separate Python installation.

[lanterk]

For 9, I would just go with youtube-dl -f 140 (or 141 in some cases). No reason for lossy->lossy conversion.

[Houshalter]

Hmm I don't see any documentation for that format code.

I chose mp3 because it's the only format my ipod accepts. The formats it downloads by default won't play, even if they might be higher quality.

[rg3]

youtube-dl -F VIDEO_URL will give you a list of formats in YouTube, that you can choose using the -f option. DASH streams contain only video or only audio normally.

[Quequau]

It strikes me that with Microsoft working with Canonical to bring an Ubuntu like command line to Windows that it probably includes something like apt. This doesn't completely address your larger point but it probably would make the process easier.

[Houshalter]

Yes it seems to me that the problem with open source projects on Windows is they all expect the user to figure out their often complicated installation procedure (and then the installation of all their dependencies...)

[JustSomeNobody]

1. This would occur with a GUI as well.

Can't comment on the rest as we have yet to get Python installed.

[bithush]

> 1. Open Explorer where you downloaded youtube-dl

Already too complicated for my parents. I have shown my mother how to open her downloads folder for over a decade and she still can't do it. Sigh.

[nitrogen]

[0] ok, this is a pain pre Win 10, but ^V is supported now

Just gotta remember the old "Alt-Space, E, P" shortcut sequence. And Alt-Space, E, K for selecting/copying.

[MichaelGG]

What's wrong with right-click?

[kqr]

Forces you to take your hands off the keyboard.

[akx]

Shift-Insert, man.

[mozumder]

This is about 2 steps longer than most family member capabilities.

[gbog]

Always the same argument, and still wrong. It depends 100% on the desirability of the expected result. I have seen a non-IT guy do an incredibly complex serie of super user operations on his PC just to install CS. He was very motivated. But if you asked him to install Chrome in place of IE he would even understand what it meant.

Same: many people still use peer-to-peer software to download movies, mostly porn. I guess it is better now but for a long time you had to do some port forwarding -- yes, port forwarding -- on your home router to get bearable download speed. Nowadays it still seem very difficult to get the proper non English subtitles for movies, but it is very attractive so people do it despite all the "steps".

So, please, let's stop this "Family memebers are below-two-clicks stupid" mantra. It is false. The truths is: they usually do not care enough for the second click. When they do care enough, typing a command line is very feasible.

[mozumder]

OK then you definitely haven't met my family members, who routinely can't log in because they have the caps-lock on.

[madez]

He is saying that they can't login when the caps-lock is on because they don't care enough. I think he is right. Even old people are able to do complex stuff, but only if they care.

[chriswarbo]

I agree. I think it's important to keep track of who cares about the user's task too. As you say, if the user cares about a task, they'll jump through many hoops to get it done. Especially when money is involved (e.g. finding cracked copy of XYZ to avoid paying license fee)

When someone else wants the user to do a task, e.g. a business wants users to install and use its software, then it's definitely better to assume that users will give up at minor annoyances or complications. Again, especially when money is involved; i.e. it should be as easy as possible for people to give you money.

[JustSomeNobody]

I think this nails it.

They want to learn email? They do.

They want to learn to use FaceBook? They do.

If they really wanted to learn to download YouTube videos (Ideally using youtube-dl), they would.

[jmnicolas]

> I guess it is better now but for a long time you had to do some port forwarding

Nothing has changed for me. Did I miss something ?

[KMag]

Back when I was at LimeWire, circa 2005, we attempted to use UPnP to have LW configure port forwarding for you. Though, maybe some router vendors consider UPnP a security risk these days.

[zyngaro]

It's a command line tool not very lambda Windows user friendly; that's why it's not very popular maybe

[dalore]

SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results.

Lot's of open source projects come up top of the results when you search for stuff because of this fact.

[cookiecaper]

>SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results.

This is a myth perpetrated by Google and it's entirely false. The fact is that if you aren't actively engaged in spa--err, SEO--, you will be outgamed and crushed by anyone moderately competent at spa-- err, "internet marketing".

I make a point of replying to this because my established, objectively-superior-in-every-tangible-way company was creamed by a bad copycat that had a pre-existing spam apparatus, despite our one-year head start and, as already stated, every conceivable advantage (we were cheaper, more effective (their stuff basically didn't work at all), and much more attractive (they were using a crappy WordPress template; we had a beautiful custom design created by professional designers)).

I was dumb enough to believe Google's statement that if you're good, you'll gain organic links and your rank will rise. Our SEO strategy was based on writing a lot of blog posts and hoping their relevance and high-quality information would facilitate a rise in the ranks (our competitor had no content at all; just a landing page promoting his bad knockoff product). This strategy had basically no effect. Making good content and/or products and crossing your fingers simply does not work if you have commercial competitors.

>Lots of open source projects come up top of the results when you search for stuff because of this fact.

Technical projects that are either so ubiquitous it wouldn't make any sense for Google to display anything else, so niche that there is no real commercial competition targeting non-technical people, or both. As can be clearly seen with youtube-dl, if it's a keyword that other parties are interested in monetizing, you have to either play the game or lose. The game is not what Google or Matt Cutts say it is (that's disinformation), the game is what actually gets you to a high ranking on Google.

[CM30]

Did you actually approach the media, authorities in the niche, Techcrunch, etc?

Because you can't just rely on 'on site' SEO to succeed. Adding a bunch of content on your own site is good, but what's really needed is to get authorities elsewhere to link to it. So you need to get good at marketing/PR, in the sense of talking to people with popular sites and social media channels.

You can do a ton of stuff on your own site, but it's irrelevant if you're not being linked to or mentioned elsewhere. And one good link from say, the New York Times or BBC or some other popular site is worth a ton more than a thousand spam links from low quality domains.

[cookiecaper]

The niche was extremely specific. It's not something the NY Times or TechCrunch or other big generic media outlets would've reported on.

As for niche authorities, there are only a very small handful of them. I did contact them. One of them never replied and started deleting all references to my project off of their message boards where users had been raving about it. I don't have any official reason why, I can only speculate that they saw some sort of competitive threat in it, though it wasn't competing other than providing a service to the same small niche at the time.

Another niche authority I spoke with pretended that they were interested in running a story about me long enough to get into the beta and get a feel for how it worked, at which point they stopped replying to me, blocked me everywhere that has a block function, and tried to copy the idea themselves. Their copycat was so bad that it was shut down by their host for spam violations within a month. I tried to follow up after the fact here and never got a reply.

I got one or two sites to link to me as a paid sponsorship thing. I don't think they put nofollow on their links, but I'm sure their PageRank was pretty small anyway. My guess would be that most domains in the niche don't have a lot of influence with Google.

In a dysfunctional niche like the one I was involved in, where everyone is hyper-paranoid that any new person on the scene, even if they're not directly competing, could be their death, Google's link authority approach doesn't really work.

I made extensive use of social media through the advertising options on Facebook and Twitter. I also ran AdWords. The results from the first 2 were fine and the results from AdWords were below average. However, all that was proven to be useless when compared with an organized spam campaign, which I was intentionally trying not to run.

I've since accepted that you have to deploy some of these tactics that everyone complains about and pretends are so evil, whilst they do them behind their back. I wish I would've accepted that earlier instead of believing the bullshit that's put out about this.

[CM30]

Wow, that's pretty awful. Out of curiosity, what is this niche? Sounds like one where the major players in the field are messed up beyond belief.

Last time I heard stories like that was about heavily spammed niches, like casinos or pharmacies or SEO itself.

But yeah, if you're in a field where competitors are either ultra paranoid or sleazy, then you'll likely have to resort to 'dirty' tactics.

[cookiecaper]

I don't want to disclose the niche because it's so small that disclosing it will likely allow people to figure out what the project was. It's not something that's conventionally thought of as filled with spammers. I was pretty surprised at the total vacuum of professional behavior when I first got plugged into it.

The larger issue here is that Google's algorithms can't identify quality content without something that it already believes to be quality pointing out to it (and in a very specific way that Google detects as a "natural" link, whatever that means). This causes issues with innovative solutions that aren't immediately accepted within their niche, niches that are small and heavily paranoid, and in which incumbents maintain their positions by offensively seeking to harm and/or silence discussion of anyone they dislike, or other sites that deserve good rankings but are unable to get acclaim from either the NYT or the niche-equivalent. You shouldn't need an entity Google trusts to run a story on you to get good rankings. It'd be great if Google fixed that, but I don't really expect them to do so.

We should just make it known among real entrepreneurs that they shouldn't have reservations about SEO tactics (which are almost all somewhat uncomfortable, at least) and that they are required to compete so that no one else with a good, legit business gets quashed by a spammer because Matt Cutts and Google swears up and down that not only do you not need to do anything but "make good content", but that you'll be hurt if you take artificial steps to enhance your rank. It's BS -- those artificial steps are mandatory to control ranking.

[mootothemax]

>SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results

You have tell Google what your site is about, otherwise it's pretty hopeless; you're pretty much well asking Google to guess what terms the site should rank for.

The five-minute-basics this site needs are to create a meaningful title tag (getting "YouTube Downloader" in there would be a great start. With zero research, maybe even "YouTube Downloader - Save Videos for Later"), create a friendly meta description that'll tell people what it's about in the search result pages, and use an H1 where it's currently using a TD with "subtitle" class.

It wouldn't hurt to also have a short bullet-point list of uses cases, just to get related search terms - e.g. "save youtube to my computer" - that the big G can use to direct users to the site.

>Lot's of open source projects come up top of the results when you search for stuff because of this fact.

The problem is so bad, I know lots of people - myself included - who hunt for projects first on Github, and Google a distant second.

Google is capable of some quite incredible things; using mind-reading to find out the important parts of a project or what it relates to, sadly, isn't one of their core strengths.

[dalore]

Google pretty much ignore or place a very very low value on meta description and titles since it's so easy to game. External links, from high ranking reputable sites is where the most value is at since they are hard to game.

Example would be linking to this project page from the wikipedia page for youtube. Also the text used for links is important.

Yes google is a mind reader and it does figure what your page is about. It's actually not that hard using natural language toolkits to process the text on the page and figure it out. See http://www.nltk.org/

[OJFord]

    > The problem is so bad, I know lots of people - myself
    > included - who hunt for projects first on Github, and
    > Google a distant second.

Seriously?

I search with `site:github.com` all the time.

[jefurii]

DuckDuckGo has !github, !gh, !ghcode, and !gist.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=github

[OJFord]

That just takes me to GH search results, though.

My point is I find that I have more success with Google's indexing than Github's own (same with SO; many others).

[TheGrassyKnoll]

And don't forget !yt for YouTube search from DuckDuckGo. (!bang will show you almost 8000 bang options)

[mootothemax]

>Seriously?

>I search with `site:github.com` all the time.

Yup - I find that Google's index isn't always as fresh as Github's, and being able to filter by code vs. repository vs. issues and then by language if necessary is a great help.

Basically, for me, finding open-source projects is a real unsolved problem!

[rplnt]

SMPlayer, which I use, includes some sort of yt downloader, not that I ever used it.

As for the SEO - I haven't had any problems in the last years. First or second hit was a working webpage that gave me the downlaod url (not much options though).

[wslh]

> The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs...

I think it is time antivirus, Google Chrome, et al recognize those installers as crapware and give a warning before installation (yes, including Java SDK and Skype trying to install toolbars). Currently Google Chrome is giving a malware warning just because you have an .exe in your web page that for them seems malware, and if you work in

[retube]

> Currently Google Chrome is giving a malware warning just because you have an .exe

So how should one make available for download windows executables?

[wslh]

More info here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9512919/getting-around-ch...

[hawski]

Is this detection working for msi or zip files?

[wslh]

Yes.

[macco]

The link an hacker news will definitly help.

[kalessin]

I literally taught my younger brother how to pip install --upgrade youtube-dl from cmd.exe and then use it.

[Mahn]

To be fair, it it wasn't a crapware YouTube Downloader, it would be something else. As long as "computer intuition" doesn't become more commonplace, we are always going to have this problem despite our best efforts to get rid of crapware on the net.

[haddr]

Spot on!

However I worry that if projects such as this or mps-youtube (console youtube player) get mainstream, they would be effectively shut down in some way...

[blablabla123]

Yeah, you really need to go through the documentation if you want to download something the way you want. I guess it's more like wget.

[z3t4]

Open source projects should use more restrictive license or someone will be able to take this and bundle it with crapware + SEO.

[aluhut]

It's not easy because it's an command line.

Not a single family member would touch this here.

It's sad but understandable.

[arprocter]

I threw this together for the less savvy

  #!/bin/bash
  clear
  youtube-dl -U
  echo " "
  echo "YouTube Downloader Script"
  echo "A video file will be created in the folder where this script is located"
  echo " "
  echo "Please paste a URL and hit [ENTER]:"
  read URL
  youtube-dl $URL

Edit: youtube-dl -U only works if it was manually installed, so leave that out if you installed from apt or whatever

[soared]

Equally as meaningless to every average user. People on HN/github/etc generally just don't understand what it means to be a non-technical user.

[arprocter]

You can mark it execute on click.

Granted you still need to know how to cut and paste

[jefurii]

Can't find the link now but I remember a computer educator in the UK describing how he taught the command-line to a bunch of seniors.

They had been complaining about how difficult it was to follow all the crazy windows popping up everywhere and never knowing which button to click. This is actually a problem for many seniors.

One day he installed Linux on a PC, booted into the console, and told them that this was "story mode". He gave them a list of commands along with mnemonics, and talked about how in "story mode" you always had a list of all the commands you typed so you always knew what you'd been doing.

[aluhut]

An adblocker fixed that for my seniors.

Still need to uninstall Chrome from time to time though. Thanks Avast Update.

[cheshire_cat]

If you are looking for something to give your family members, almost everyone I know uses the open-source tool jdownloader [0] to download youtube videos.

It's a ponderous java monster but it works great and comes with a huge plugin collection for numerous sites.

The fact that it has a gui makes it really accessibly to non-technical people.

There seems to be talk about AdWare in the installer but I personally never had that problem and you can get around that by downloading the executable .jar.

[0] http://jdownloader.org/home/index?s=lng_en

[aluhut]

I know jdownloader. Have been using it in it's early days for 1-click hosters on a separate machine. Don't trust it at all ;)

[cheshire_cat]

I don't trust it that much either, but in the end jdownloader gets developed by a company registered in Germany. [0]

If they ever did something really sinister they would be quickly out of business.

[0] http://www.wemakeyourappwork.com

http://www.wemakeyourappwork.com/#contact

[Jordrok]

Another jdownloader user here. I have similar misgivings about its trustworthiness, but so far I haven't found any concrete reasons to distrust it other than that vague sense of unease. It's just so damn useful though!

[chriswarbo]

> It's not easy because it's an command line.

> Not a single family member would touch this here.

> It's sad but understandable.

I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath.

In the case of this discussion, the typical user flow would be something like:

- Double click browser

- Enter special string of text "youtube.com" in URL box and hit enter

- Enter strings of text into YouTube search box to find videos

- Copy special string "https://youtube.com/watch?v=abcdefg" from URL box

- Enter another special string "google.com" in URL box and hit enter

- Enter strings of text into Google search box and hit enter

- Click SuperDuperVideoDownload link

- Paste special string "https://youtube.com/watch?v=abcdefg" into SuperDuperVideoDownload box and hit enter

Present this user with a CLI like youtube-dl, and they'll complain that they don't like the idea of copy/pasting special strings into boxes.

youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults too; e.g. "youtube-dl https://......" will Just Work (TM). Switches are only needed for fancier stuff (e.g. "Download highest quality Free format and extract the audio track")

[aluhut]

I'm curious. So you think, this may work as an argument? You think that if I tell my parents this, they'll suddenly start using the command line?

Let me tell you how it works now:

I've installed a download addon for them. Because they have no idea and before they install crap, I'll do it for them.

I did not explain anything nor did I tell them that I did install that addon.

They automatically clicked the red "download" icon under every youtube video they watch and it downloads the video.

So short: 1 step.

This is userfriendly and easy.

[chriswarbo]

> You think that if I tell my parents this, they'll suddenly start using the command line?

Probably not, but that doesn't really matter as it was never the intention (if it were, there's probably a better place to write it than Hacker News).

I was offering software developers a perspective which demonstrates that the GUI/CLI distinction is mostly artificial, and that a CLI doesn't automatically mean "hard to use". After all, as others have pointed out, people managed just fine on DOS back in the day (where "managed just fine" == "shouting at machine for not doing things right", just like today).

> This is userfriendly and easy.

I don't like applying the phrase "userfriendly" to a piece of software, as it depends just as much on the user.

For example, I'm a user of youtube-dl, and I find it incredibly userfriendly: when I use it in scripts, I just write "youtube-dl" followed by flags for the appropriate behaviour. In contrast, your solution sounds really unfriendly to me. First my script would need to open a browser, and since the downloader is part of an addon, I wouldn't be able to use PhantomJS like I usually would. Instead, I'd probably have to go off and learn Selenium, assuming that Selenium drivers can use browser addons? If not, I might have to write a custom XUL app (not done that in a while!), and make sure it's compatible with the addon. Does XUL even work on a headless machine (in my case, RaspberryPi with SSH access)?

[aluhut]

You are of course right with the part about user-friendliness but you do realize that most of the internet population did not understand what you tried to say with most of the sentences? ;)

So yes, it depends on the users just as well as your target group.

I'm not sure what your assumption that the difference is mostly artificial bases on since just the difference in the physical act is already overwhelming.

[zeeZ]

You missed a couple steps at the beginning there:

- Select browser icon

- Double click browser icon

- Click into search box

- Type "youtube"

- Disregard suggestions, hit enter

- Click on first thing that says YouTube

[chriswarbo]

Well, there are lots of ways people interact with browsers; that was just an example. Personally I don't type "google.com", "youtube.com" either, I use Conkeror's web shortcuts.

Still, the point is that it's not much different than running a commandline, e.g. something like:

- Click Gnome Do icon

- type "youtube-dl " and paste URL

- Click the "run" suggestion

- Click on Home launcher

- Watch filename until ".f123." bit disappears from the extension

[Namrog84]

Yes. This exactly. I know many that don't type in url or even search on YouTube. They just click around. One time a family member asked if all the videos after they watched mine(I sent direct link) were mine as well. They apparently watched 5+ videos thinking they were mine but just happened to be displayed in sidebar and other.

[rasz_pl]

>youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults

not really, if you copy url of a clip in a playlist it will start downloading WHOLE playlist :(

[rg3]

As it was pointed out the first time youtube-dl was on Hacker News, our user base seems to be split regarding that behavior. When you copy a URL from a playlist, the URL includes both the video id and the playlist id.

Some people want to download the whole playlist when passing a URL from one of the videos (because otherwise it's hard to get an URL that contains just the playlist). Some other people just want to download the video they are currently watching.

That's why we have the --no-playlist option, which you can use and even stick in the configuration file. There's also --yes-playlist to override the configuration file if you need to.

[OJFord]

Why not drop to a "did you want the playlist, or just this video?" prompt?

Side-benefit: force care to be taken to be explicit if used in a script.

Personally, without reading any docs the first thing I did was paste in just a video ID (i.e. not the entire URL) so it seems natural to me that including both would be ambiguous.

[slrz]

> Why not drop to a "did you want the playlist, or just this video?" prompt?

Introducing breaking changes like this are no longer an option once your program has more than 5 users.

In addition, well-behaved command line programs aren't supposed to gratuitously prompt for input anyway.

[chriswarbo]

It's debatable whether that should be the default or not; compare it to, say, printing diagnostic info by default and requiring a special `--download` option.

One thing I always change from the default behaviour is video quality: by default it wastes a ton of bandwidth and disk space getting "HD" versions. I can understand why that's the default, but I don't particularly care about resolution, as it's a pretty negligible contributor to quality compared to the actual content of the video.

[exhilaration]

I think that's an amazing feature. It does the same thing for Soundcloud playlists.

[JadeNB]

> youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults too; e.g. "youtube-dl https://......" will Just Work (TM).

Are you sure that this is true? Starting many updates ago, but continuing into the present (I just updated to 2016.04.06 to be sure), I encountered a weird situation where

    $ ./youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE

fails but

    $ ./youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE

works. I have no problem with the second working, but don't understand why the first fails. It seems to be fine for other video services; only YouTube requires this URL-processing step.

[chriswarbo]

    $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading webpage
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading video info webpage
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Extracting video information
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading MPD manifest
    WARNING: Requested formats are incompatible for merge and will be merged into mkv.
    [download] Destination: True Detective - My Least Favorite Life - Lera Lynn Scene-wbKJt1NQtZE.f136.mp4
    [download]  19.3% of 35.60MiB at  1.51MiB/s ETA 00:18

Seems to work for me. I always double-quote the parameter anyway (I never trust the shell to handle my strings...)

I just tried `youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE` and that works too. I didn't know the "v" parameter could be given like that!

[JadeNB]

In case anyone else hits this (admittedly very specific) problem, nathyong (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461326 )'s suggestion, and a subsequent USE (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/276731/shell-eating-...) question, made it clear that my issue is that I had some time turned on `nullglob`, so `https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE ` was being taken as a very strange, certainly non-matching, glob.

[JadeNB]

Very strange. Perhaps it's some setup- or platform-dependent thing; I will file an issue. Thanks for checking!

EDIT: Very strange; I thought I'd give a try to what seemed a throwaway comment in your post, about quoting the string, and that fixed it. Thanks!

Without the double quotes (which seemed to be unnecessary for you), I still get:

    $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
    Usage: youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

    youtube-dl: error: You must provide at least one URL.
    Type youtube-dl --help to see a list of all options.

I guess that some alias is grabbing some part of the URL string.

[nathyong]

It's possible your shell has some kind of regular expression magic enabled that is eating the '?' and the '=' characters:

  $ echo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=wbKJt1NQtZE
  youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
  
  $ echo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
  zsh: no matches found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE

[rawTruthHurts]

> I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath.

Are you sure you apprehend the differences between the look and feel of a browser and that of a command line?

[trentlott]

So then someone should create a dynamic hybrid console-browser.

Take, Chrome, flip it such that the input bar is on the bottom, and allow it to display console output as HTML.

Or, hell, keep it the way it is and just run the console HTML downward; why maintain the current terminal layout at all...

[CalRobert]

Depends on the family. My mom taught me DOS.

[kqr]

Well...

My mom did teach me DOS, and programming, and a lot of other things – but these days she doesn't have that kind of patience anymore. If things don't work right away, out the window they go. For a lot of people the patience with technology decreases as they age.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Absolutely. I'm also an example of that. 15 years ago it was difficult to see my PC tower closed and without the entrails exposed, I was always trying strange Linux distributions and stuff like BSD or BeOS, and I configured everything I could in OSs and programs.

Now, if my hardware fails I just call tech support, I mostly use Windows, I almost never spend more than 5 minutes configuring anything, and any program I need to compile from sources is basically a no-no except if it's something I really need or can't avoid. In fact I'm so lazy that I tend not to install games that aren't on Steam, after being spoiled by Steam anything harder than double clicking to install game in each of my PCs seems like too much work to me.

In other aspects I don't think I'm so different from 15 years ago, this laziness with technology may be the aspect where I think age has manifested the most!

[CalRobert]

Not to be morbid, but at some point in my mid-late 20's I considered how many Sunday afternoons I have left in my life. The thought made me a lot less likely to want to spend them dealing with xorg.conf or fiddling with drivers. Though for me, the solution has been to use plain-vanilla desktop Ubuntu on a laptop that ships with it (XPS 13).

[xiphias]

It has nothing to do with lazyness for me. When I was young I wasn't getting money for tinkering with hardware, neither for programming. Nowdays I get lots of money for programming...guess which of the 2 I'm doing more

[TeMPOraL]

For me it's about time. When I was a kid / teenager I had tons of free time for experimenting, and I didn't really care much for school. Now that I'm employed, I feel like those 8 hours are in fact the whole day. So I have less patience for things that are only tangential to the goal I'm trying to achieve.

[giancarlostoro]

This is true, while my mom never taught me too much she still did plenty in DOS. My dad on the other hand... He has an iPhone but would be happy with a flip phone, he uses the exact same amount of functionality that both phones carry, only difference being he has to touch his screen.

[kccqzy]

Off topic but just want to say, Apple knows there are many people like this, and the 16GB models are designed for them. I tire of seeing whines about 16GB being not enough. We the tech people are siloed in our own bubble and we often can't comprehend the existence of such people, unless they are our family members/close friends.

[giancarlostoro]

Well I don't mind him having a modernized phone, at least he gets a GPS. Not sure if he's ever used it, he probably could, he just likes to be simple I guess. As for the 16GB my only peeve against Apple (I'm an Android user though) is no availability to add in an SD card, even if it can't be used as "permanent" storage SD cards hold their value for being portable and transferable. It wont affect me as much though since I'm an Android user.

I'm inclined to agree with you though, except hard drive space is a lot cheaper these days, for about $10 I can have a 32 GB USB 3.0 thumb drive. Eventually the cheaper iPhone options should just carry a minimal 32GB if they decide to stop overcharging for more space. Videos and images are only going to increase in file size over the years to account for 4K adaptability, granted that might take quite a while.

[aluhut]

My parents bought me my C64. I'll always be thankful for that and therefore will remain calm helping them out in this mad digital world they don't understand at all.

[otterpro]

I also want to thank my parents for buying me C64, my first computer, especially during the time when my family wasn't doing so well financially; I can't ever be upset about giving tech support to my parents.

It reminds me of a C64 TV ad of a student who had to drop out of college because he didn't have computer skills to be competitive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDcZeGbElnM). Somehow, it all seems relevant now, as C64 gave me a start on programming.

[ekianjo]

I prefer cli 1000 times over an overly badly designed gui anytime

[broodbucket]

Sure, but that's not the point, the point is most people are intimidated by a command line and don't want to have to learn it to accomplish the thing they're trying to do

[aluhut]

Especially if you don't use it elsewhere or the task does not justify learning it. Like here.

[sombremesa]

Good! The top slots belong to those services which don't require you to download anything but the video to your computer. In this day and age, is there really any excuse for making anything beyond a web app, or in rare cases, a browser app?

If I want to do a one off task, I'm not going to download any software for it, when I know there is an alternative that can be used entirely on the browser.

There are plenty of addons for major browsers that do this. Those belong on page 1, not this. Most users don't give a shit about FOSS.