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Oleg Che
Oleg Che

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I built a free YouTube/SoundCloud downloader for Windows that runs entirely on your PC

#showdev #opensource #python #microsoft

Every "download a YouTube video" website looks the same: ads, pop-ups, and a big green button that takes you somewhere you did not want to go. And if you need a different site (SoundCloud, Vimeo, TikTok...), you need a different downloader.

I wanted one place where I could drop any link and get a normal file. So I built Universal Downloader, a free, open-source Windows app on top of yt-dlp.

Pasting a link and picking a quality

What it does

  • Paste a link, get a file. YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, TikTok, Instagram and 1000+ other sites that yt-dlp supports. MP4 from 144p to 4K, MP3 with cover art and tags, or M4A without re-encoding.
  • Playlists and queues. Paste a playlist link to take the whole thing, or paste several links (one per line) and they download one after another.
  • Music by name. The Music tab searches YouTube, SoundCloud and Rutube at once. You get one list with covers, can listen in a built-in player, tick a few songs and download them with one button.
  • Audio tracks and subtitles. Pick a language, embed subtitles or save a separate .srt.
  • A browser extension (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Firefox) or a bookmarklet for everything else: open a video, click, and the app picks up the link.
  • Works behind a proxy. If a site does not open directly, the app can go through your VPN app's local proxy (v2rayN, Clash, Hiddify...).
  • Light and dark theme, Russian and English interface, and it keeps itself and yt-dlp up to date.

Searching music by name

No ads, no accounts, no servers

Everything happens on your computer. The UI is just a local web page, served by a tiny Flask server that listens on 127.0.0.1 only. There is nothing to sign up for and no third-party server in the middle.

You do not need to install Python either. On first start a small script downloads a private copy of Python 3.12, yt-dlp, ffmpeg and Deno into the app folder and verifies every download with SHA-256. Nothing is installed system-wide, and the bundled uninstall script (Удалить.bat) removes it all.

Try it

  1. Download universal-downloader.zip from the latest release (Windows 10/11, about 350 MB after the first-run setup).
  2. Unpack it and double-click Запуск.bat ("Start").
  3. A tray icon appears and the app opens in your browser.

Source code and docs: github.com/OlegChe77/universal-downloader

What I would love to hear

  • Sites or links that fail for you (the error message has a "Details" button with the raw yt-dlp output, which is handy for an issue).
  • What is confusing on first start.
  • Missing options you would actually use.

It is a wrapper for personal use, so please download only what you have the right to, and follow the terms of the sites you use.

If you try it, tell me how it went in the comments or open an issue on GitHub.

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