ViDL 1.0.2
ViDL is a free Mac app that allows you to easily download videos from YouTube and hundreds of other websites for offline viewing.
It is based on the popular youtube-dl command line tool, but much easier to use, especially with videos/playlists that require a login (like your personal “Watch Later” list).
See also: Downie.
Previously:
Update (2020-03-27): See also: Josh Centers, Softorino YouTube Converter 2.
As promised, here’s a write-up on how I use iOS Shortcuts to save an URL to Dropbox and have Downie download a video.
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Why does this app embed a 35MB password protected zip file ? I'd rather keep using ClipGrab.
I'm sure Ole would answer if you asked. He produces extremely high quality software and I have no doubt this will be the same. Just looking at how nicely he implemented Safari extension installation made me realize I have some work to do...
That said, if I had to guess, I suspect that the password protection is designed to prevent the zip file containing the command-line utilities from automatically being extracted by an overzealous unarchiving utility, not to provide any kind of security as zip password crackers are widely available.
I wonder how it got through notarization with an encrypted archive in the Resources folder. My experience has been that notarization looks inside archives and fails if it can’t open them.
It was admittedly a quick and dirty solution to a problem I was facing with notarization. The whole idea is that you can use your own build of ffmpeg if you like. Iirc the password for the zip archive is simply ViDL if you want to check for yourself.
Well, to be honest, I wasn't sure how to sign the embedded ffmpeg binaries properly because the idea was also that you could exchange them easily for your own build, if you like. If you want to check for yourself, the password for the zip file is simply "ViDL", and it contains just the same ffmpeg binaries that are then copied to ~/Library/Application Support/ViDL. I hope that clears things up.
Sorry, the password is actually "vidl", even simpler, so you can verify that nothing fishy is going on there, but I'd like to find a better solution for this of course.
Does it have a way to specify what quality to download? First time I tried it, it downloaded the 640 version, not the 1080 version..
@Mark It currently uses a “reasonable default”, and is mostly meant for people who don’t want to fiddle with a lot of settings (and it’s a weekend/side project), but I’ll definitely consider a “maximum quality” option or something along those lines.
