tubic

A simple lightweight portable single-file program to download video or audio (as .mp3) from YouTube.

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• Installation
• Backstory
• Building
  • Software requirements
  • First run
  • GUI editing
  • Regular make targets
• Licensing

Installation

0. You should have a Windows 10 or Windows 11 operating system
1. Download the executable named tubic.exe, from the latest release
2. Run the executable

Backstory

Why making another YouTube downloader? Click here if you want to look over my 300 words long justification

Why making another YouTube downloader, when we already have %YOUR_FAVORITE_APP_NAME%, which is a lot better, than this stuff will ever be?

Well...

Just for fun

Because I can

I've been trying out several tools of that kind, and each one of them had some flaw critical for me. Such as:

• overweight — installing TarTube once took me something about half an hour
• console-only — so I was unable to recomend it to my elderly relatives and non-IT friends
• comercial
• server-side component — so at some point you find your tool turned into a pumpkin because the servers are down (that's exactly what happened with me once)
• overly complex GUI (again elderly relatives won't appriciate)

I feel an unfulfilled demand for a very simple tool, which would:

• -be able to download both video and audio by a YouTube link
• -download audios as .mp3-files
• -have a simple GUI (the less buttons — the better)
• -be portable (ideally: packed in a single executable)
• -do post-processing (video: 1080p → 780p or audio: 320 kbps → 96 kbps)

The features I (subjectively) consider redundant:

• sequential download from a list of links

So that's how I've decided to make this stuff.

It uses yt-dlp (and utilizes probably less then 5% of it's full functionality).

The UI is implemented with PyQt6.

The application is packed in a single executable file with no dependencies (thanks to pyinstaller).

The target OS is currently Windows ≥ 10. Though, there's no OS-dependent features or libs used, so you're free to try and build it on Linux. And of course you'll have to replace the ffmpeg.exe binary.

Building

Software requirements

• python3.11

• make tool — for build-automation. To install it on Windows, one can try GNU make 4.3 package from the Chocolatey package manager.

• Poetry — to administer Python dependencies.

• Qt Designer — to edit *.ui files (to draw windows and GUI elements in WYSIWYG editor). Versions 5.* and 6.* are equaly suitable. To install it there are several options:

  • a third party standalone installer
  • a PySide6 pip package (pip install PySide6 or poetry add -D PySide6, and then run pyside6-designer)
  • the official site — ironicaly, not the best way, cause it is not distributed separately from all the over Qt tools and requires registration

First run

In the project directory execute make install.

GUI editing

Qt Designer related files can be found at tubic/qt_wrap/ui.

Regular make targets

• make test — run unit tests
• make runpy — run app with Python
• make build — create an executable in a bin folder

Licensing

• Current repository is licensed under MIT License
• The icons for this application were taken from paomedia's small-n-flat set and licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal
• ffmpeg is licensed under a mixed license, compatible with MIT License