Youloader

A free desktop app to download YouTube videos, audio, and playlists, on your own machine.

Paste a link, pick a quality up to 8K, and save the video (MP4) or audio (MP3/M4A). Everything runs locally on your own connection, nothing is uploaded and there are no accounts, quotas, or ads.

Site: youloader.robinrahman.pro · Download · Guide & troubleshooting

Intel Macs aren't prebuilt (Apple Silicon covers Macs since late 2020); build from source if you need one.

Builds are unsigned for now, so Windows shows a SmartScreen prompt (More info → Run anyway) and macOS needs a right-click → Open. The guide walks through it. Windows and Linux builds update themselves; macOS users re-download.

• Videos and whole playlists from a single link, any quality from 144p to 8K.
• MP4 video or MP3 / M4A audio.
• Subtitles (incl. auto-generated) as a .srt sidecar.
• SponsorBlock — skip sponsor segments.
• Trim a video to a start/end section.
• Clipboard auto-detect — copy a link, the app pre-fills it.
• Cookies (from your browser or a cookies.txt) to get past YouTube's "confirm you're not a bot" gate.
• Live speed and ETA while downloading.
• Auto-update on Windows and Linux.

A thin desktop shell over the proven yt-dlp engine:

• yt-dlp (nightly) resolves and downloads. Auto-downloaded on first run.
• ffmpeg merges separate video/audio streams and extracts audio. Bundled.
• Deno runs yt-dlp's JavaScript solver for YouTube's "n challenge". Auto-downloaded.

Nothing for the user to install separately. See docs/BUILD-NOTES.md for the full story (the bot gate, the n-challenge, packaging) and docs/BUILDING.md / docs/RELEASING.md for build and release details.

• Electron + electron-vite
• React + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS v4
• A separate Next.js landing page in web/, deployed on Vercel
• Packaged with electron-builder; built for all three OSes in CI

pnpm install
pnpm dev              # run the app
pnpm build            # bundle main + preload + renderer
pnpm check-types

# package an installer for your OS:
pnpm package:win      # or package:mac / package:linux

Built by Robin. MIT licensed.