NOTE: This will no longer be updated except bugfixes

YDL, a Simple GUI Launcher for yt-dlp on Windows using AHK.

• AHK1.1.*

• 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.*
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. Run update.ahk with AHK. This will download both the script and yt-dlp to the same folder.
6. Run YDL.ahk with AHK.

Any .conf file present in the script directory will be available as a profile. For more information on yt-dlp 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.

Any output path given in the profile MUST NOT be an absolute path. If it is, the file will be downloaded to the path given in the profile irrespective of the path specified in the GUI.

It is recomended that you make your own profiles instead of editing the exising ones since updates will reset the profile back to default.

All settings are saved in the file ydl.ahk.ini. The settings are read when the script starts and saved everytime a download sucessfully launches. All options that is to be passed into yt-dlp directly must be properly escaped.

These options are not changable in the GUI.

This field accepts all the same options as yt-dlp. 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 yt-dlp 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 format selection and output path are set by the script using -S and -P options of yt-dlp. Since these options don't exist in youtube-dl, it cannot be used as a replacement.

To update the script, simply run update.ahk.