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Show HN: I made a tool to save multimedia from various platforms

My goal is to create a free media downloader that doesn't bother you. friendly, efficient, and has no paywalls or anything like that.

I've been working on that for the last 3 weeks or so, it's not perfect yet, but it works, and I'm really excited to share it.

You can't post direct links you get from youtube on your server to the users, they will get 403 most often if they use these links from different IP.

Heck, you even have the IP in the link itself :) 2605:a140:2236:8761::1

Also for protected media, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk it only gives 360p and audio this way. Far from 4K you promise.

2 days agodzek69

I was hesitant to open the link, thought it was a rick-roll. I've been working on the other downloaders, and I guess YouTube is one of the most used platforms, a lot of people are asking me to fix the youtube-downloader, I think I'll start working on that, thanks for bringing it up.

2 days agosanusihassan

Where can one learn how to do this and all the mechanics of how its done? One of my greatest fears is not having good YT streaming and downloading solutions in the future :(

2 days agoObscurity4340

I use Firefox and I see (on the player's settings) that it goes as high as 1080. The addon of my InternetDownloadManager also goes as high as 1080.

2 days agoHenryBemis

How does this differ from something like yt-dlp? I assume that's what you use under the hood.

2 days agoteach

yt-dlp actually works for YT.

2 days agorasz

Ease of use probably.

2 days agoSaris

Keep it up there are never enough media downloaders online, somehow they always fade away into oblivion.

2 days agosharpshadow

So does it support downloading something that requires a specific account? This sounds like a job for a browser extension and not a website.

Otherwise a very good idea and definitely necessary in today's world.

2 days agogear54rus

thank you so much, these are the words I needed to keep working on this tool.

2 days agosanusihassan

I'm increasingly suspicious that Java applets were removed from the browser so it wouldn't be easy for non-nerds to easily run tools like yt-dlp from their browser.

2 days agoxnx

How about like 10-15 years ago when everybody and their mother could spin up a RAT and do drive-by installations with a webpage?

2 days agoapfsx

YouTube wasn’t even around when Java applets were a thing.

Also back then anything multimedia was also served via a plugin. Multimedia in the Java applet era was either streaming via Real Player, or later, via Flash.

2 days agohnlmorg

Right. I'm saying that Java Applets could've put too much control into the hands of the user, so they had to be removed in 2015.

2 days agoxnx

Java Applets had fallen out of fashion long before then. Like a decade earlier. The only reason browsers and JRE continued to support it was because of enterprise middleware like Oracle. But for home users applets had long since been replaced by Flash.

The reason applets were unfashionable had nothing to do with control. It was because:

1. They were hard to support: there was different Java runtimes (thanks to Microsoft creating an incompatible version of Java, which eventually lead to them inventing .NET). But even with Sun Java, there are different versions of JRE and no way to guarantee a particular browser had the right version of JRE installed.

2. Insecure. I really don’t miss the days of drive by download exploits

3. Too much effort to program for. When you had Flash with its mostly drag and drop interface, why would most people want to learn Java?

4. HTML5 eventually became a thing. Meaning you didn’t even need Flash let alone Java.

5. Applets were never ported to mobile devices. Which is ironic given Java runs on a plethora of niche hardware from some types of optical storage through to Android itself. However applets themselves were strictly limited to desktop browsers. A limitation even Flash didn’t have.

Java applets were removed because it was a technological dead end. Users hated it, security teams hated it, Windows administrators hated it, and web developers didn’t even use it.

I can’t remember exactly when I fell out of love with applets but I have a feeling it was before even the 00s.

And as for your point about control, you could still do everything you described without the need for applets. It was really easy to rip streams back then (just as it still is easy now).

2 days agohnlmorg

I would think the big factor for running yt-dlp in a browser would be CORS, not the language used to implement the downloader?

2 days ago01HNNWZ0MV43FF

Yes, and other limitations of network access that Java applets did not have.

2 days agoxnx

Java had restrictions on cross-domain access just like Javascript does and Flash did.

Users could grant applets additional permissions - but that also granted them local permissions (like reading files) which were unambiguously a security risk.

2 days agoduskwuff

It could be super useful but I tried to download an instagram reel and it doesn't work. https://www.instagram.com/p/DE3gmTfsUlg/?hl=fr

2 days agodagorenouf

If you have time, please try again, it's still not 100% but I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

a day agosanusihassan

B0rken. . Gives me the following error: Access to rr2---sn-vgqsrnek.googlevideo.com was denied.

You don't have authorisation to view this page.

HTTP Error 403

2 days agostunnAR

Any way to check Instagram posts without login the account?

2 days agoterrycody

yt-dlp wrapper?

2 days agoboraturan

not totally, I used yt_dlp for the Twitter downloader and the YouTube downloader

2 days agosanusihassan

What's the legality of tools like this?

2 days agocloudking

this is a good service for those who cannot use yt-dlp on the command line. However I am turned off by the AI generated images, they are very odd and have nothing to do with the website. Also some of the text reads like AI marketing speak

2 days agoderkades

Loom downloader is also useful. You cannot download a Loom if you are not premium.

2 days agodevops000

Can we get pornhub/eporner support too? :)

2 days agobouillebasset

No, that goes against my religion and ethics.

2 days agosanusihassan

Any plan to make that a Chrome extension?

2 days agolibpcap

Most of the time, I look for online tools to download media, but a Chrome extension could also be a good idea too.

2 days agosanusihassan

bless up, I've been looking for this

2 days agoqthedoc

thank you!

2 days agosanusihassan
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2 days ago