Video Tools

Media Downloader – frontend to multiple CLI-based tools

Media Downloader is a Qt/C++ based GUI frontend to multiple CLI-based tools that deal with downloading online media.

At the heart of Media Downloader is yt-dlp, an awesome CLI tool. yt-dlp is a really useful utility for downloading videos from YouTube. But it’s a lot more than just a YouTube downloader tool. It takes all the great features of youtube-dl, exploits your full network download speeds, and offers some surprising useful features not found in other projects.

Media Downloader is also a frontend for youtube-dl, gallery-dl, Lux, you-get, svtplay-dl, aria2c, wget and safari books.

Installation

There are packages for a variety of Linux distros including Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and even Raspbian.

As we’re using Ubuntu 23.10, we downloaded the binary package for xUbuntu 23.10.

It installs using dpkg with no issues.

Installing Media Downloader in Ubuntu

There’s also a package in the Arch User Repository for Arch and Arch-based distros.

This is a cross-platform tool. The project provides binaries for Windows, handy if you’re still living on the dark side of the moon.

On startup, media-downloader performs a few checks to see if certain software packages are installed. These are yt-dlp, aria2c and ffmpeg. On our test system we saw that aria2c isn’t installed. That’s easily rectified on Ubuntu by installing a snap.

$ snap install aria2c

aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol and multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. ffmpeg is software designed for processing of video and audio files.

Restarting Media Downloader confirms everything is now hunky dory.

Media Downloader - Basic Downloader

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Extensions
Page 4 – Summary

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