Fangirls is a super-simple front-end to the youtube-dl project. In short, it grabs the source of videos you watch on the web, and downloads them to your computer. Despite the name, youtube-dl supports vastly more services than YouTube — you can see a full list. It's also a pretty active project; if there's a site that it doesn't work for, the developers are willing to take requests.
One problem with youtube-dl is that it's a Python app that you have to use from the command line. I love the command line as much as any card-carrying nerd, but I wanted to build a quick Mac app, and this seemed like a good opportunity.
Here's a picture of Fangirls in action:
It's pretty bare-bones at this point. Paste in the URL of a web page that contains a video, and Fangirls will use an included copy of youtube-dl to pull the video data from that page and download what it finds. In bullet form, then:
- Download videos from the sites that youtube-dl supports;
- Multiple video-per-page support: it'll show a progress bar for each video it finds;
- Choose your download location
- ...what else do you even need?
Yeah, actually there's a ton of features in youtube-dl that aren't supported in Fangirls. Here's a list of a few that I'd like to implement:
- Show/pick from a list of available formats. While most videos that come down are in Mac-friendly MP4 format, some strange folks upload webm, and that's what you end up with if it's the highest-quality format.
- Provide more of the power of youtube-dl. I mean, just look at all the options. A lot of it is unnecessary for the vast majority of users, but some configuration could be handy to prevent trips to the command line.
- UI niceties, like storing the videos you've downloaded, showing the original source page, providing Preferences
- A mechanism for updating youtube-dl and showing what version it's at. This should really happen in the background.
It's a word my 12-year-old daughter is using a lot these days, both as a noun and (more entertainingly) a verb. It's interchangeably a derogation and word of praise. And it was on my mind when I sat at the New Project dialogue in Xcode the other night.
Har, har. It was me.
I'm releasing Fangirls under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. In short, you can do whatever you like with this code as long as you give me credit. Which brings me to...
I'd be happy to accept your PRs! Make a fork of this project and shoot me a pull request and let's make Fangirls truly fangirl-worthy.