Updated November, 2021! Fangirls is now based on the successor to Youtube-DL, yt-dlp. It also includes far-better video support, downloading more reliably, and with better progress information. Finally, it allows you to cancel and remove downloads. I was so impressed with myself, I up'd the version to 2.0. 🙌🏻
Fangirls is a super-simple front-end to the yt-dlp project. In short, it grabs the source of videos you watch on the web, and downloads them to your computer. Despite the name, yt-dlp 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 yt-dlp 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:
Paste in the URL of a web page that contains a video, and Fangirls will use an included copy of yt-dlp 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;
- Choose your download location
- ...what else do you even need?
It's a word my 12-year-old daughter was using a lot when I originally built this, 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.
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.