Videomass – cross-platform GUI for FFmpeg and youtube-dl

A common complaint about YouTube is that to watch the material you need to use a web browser. Fortunately, some creative developers have developed applications that allow you to bypass the web-only barrier of YouTube.

Videomass is a cross-platform GUI designed for FFmpeg enthusiasts who need to manage custom profiles to automate conversion/transcoding processes. The software lets you create, edit and use FFmpeg presets and profiles with full format support. The program also offers an array of tools for audio and video conversion. And it offers a frontend to download video and audio from YouTube and other sites.

For the purposes of our review, we’ll look at Videomass from a YouTube perspective, evaluating the software viewing, analysing and processing multimedia streams and downloading videos via youtube-dl.

Installation

There is a package available for Ubuntu, but it’s not included in the official repositories. Instead, we can install the software from the developer’s Personal Package Archive (PPA). We need to tell Ubuntu where to find the PPA with the command.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jeanslack/videomass

We can then update our system and install the package.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install python3-videomass

Alternatively, we can install Videomass using pip.

$ sudo apt install python-wxtools
$ python3 -m pip install videomass

If you’re not using Ubuntu, the developer also provides an AppImage. AppImage is a format for distributing portable software on Linux without needing superuser permissions to install the application. All that’s required is to download the AppImage, and make the file executable by typing:

$ chmod u+x ./Videomass-3.4.2-x86_64.AppImage

There’s the full source code available. And there’s a Windows binary if you’re still living on the dark side.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary