A Simple GUI Launcher for my own fork of youtube-dl on Windows using AHK.

• AHK1.1
• Python3

• ffmpeg - Required for mergring audio and video files together, extracting audio, embedding metadata etc
• aria2c - Provides faster downloads for all non-DASH videos.

1. Install AHK1.1 and Python3.
2. Download the optional prerequisites if needed.
3. Download either the entire repository or just update.ahk and place the file(s) in an empty folder.
4. Either make sure the all the prerequisites (except AHK) are available in PATH variable, or copy them to the script directory.
5. Open update.ahk with AHK. This will download the latest version of both YDL and youtube-dl to the same folder.
6. Open YDL.ahk with AHK.

Any .conf file present in the script directory will be available as a profile. For more information on youtube-dl configuration files, refer to the official documentation.

The script makes two additional variables available in these configuration files:

• %ydl_dir% which expands to the script directory AND
• %ydl_home% which expands to the path given in the gui.

The profile MUST define the file naming pattern using the ydl_home variable. Eg: --output "%ydl_home%/%(uploader)s - %(title)s [%(id)s] (%(resolution)s).%(ext)s". Otherwise, the file will be downloaded to the path given in the profile (or in the script directory if either a relative path or no path is given).

It is recomended that you make your own profiles instead of editing the exising ones since updates will reset the profile back to default. (This issue will be fixed in a later version)

YDL accepts all the options of youtube-dl. These options override the settings generated by the script which in turn overrides the options in the profile.

The download process is wrapped in retry.cmd which will keep retrying the download until youtube-dl exits without any error. So, if any of the videos is not downloadable (due to the video being removed/private/age-gated, url being wrong, etc), the download will never complete. You can simply break/close the terminal window to stop the download process.

The path given in the GUI is simply a guideline for the profile on where to download the video. The profile must define the file naming pattern using this information. See Profiles for details

The format selection in YDL is done using the option --format-sort that I implemented but has not been (and probably never will be) merged with the main branch. Achieving the same effect using the main branch of youtube-dl is unnecessarily tedious and prone to error.

Other branches of youtube-dl can be used as long as this pull request is merged into it.

If you are using a different branch, you have to change https://codeload.github.com/pukkandan/youtube-dl/zip/my-tweaks in update.ahk to the url of the zip file of your desired branch. You will also need to change "%~dp0\youtube-dl-my-tweaks\youtube_dl\__main__.py" in youtube-dl.cmd to the correct path

There is no auto-update in the current version of YDL. To update, you have to manually run update.ahk. Note that this updates both the program and youtube-dl, but not any other dependancies.