It's not easy because it's an command line.
Not a single family member would touch this here.
It's sad but understandable.
Not a single family member would touch this here.
It's sad but understandable.
#!/bin/bash
clear
youtube-dl -U
echo " "
echo "YouTube Downloader Script"
echo "A video file will be created in the folder where this script is located"
echo " "
echo "Please paste a URL and hit [ENTER]:"
read URL
youtube-dl $URL
Granted you still need to know how to cut and paste
They had been complaining about how difficult it was to follow all the crazy windows popping up everywhere and never knowing which button to click. This is actually a problem for many seniors.
One day he installed Linux on a PC, booted into the console, and told them that this was "story mode". He gave them a list of commands along with mnemonics, and talked about how in "story mode" you always had a list of all the commands you typed so you always knew what you'd been doing.
Still need to uninstall Chrome from time to time though. Thanks Avast Update.
It's a ponderous java monster but it works great and comes with a huge plugin collection for numerous sites.
The fact that it has a gui makes it really accessibly to non-technical people.
There seems to be talk about AdWare in the installer but I personally never had that problem and you can get around that by downloading the executable .jar.
If they ever did something really sinister they would be quickly out of business.
> Not a single family member would touch this here.
> It's sad but understandable.
I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath.
In the case of this discussion, the typical user flow would be something like:
- Double click browser
- Enter special string of text "youtube.com" in URL box and hit enter
- Enter strings of text into YouTube search box to find videos
- Copy special string "https://youtube.com/watch?v=abcdefg" from URL box
- Enter another special string "google.com" in URL box and hit enter
- Enter strings of text into Google search box and hit enter
- Click SuperDuperVideoDownload link
- Paste special string "https://youtube.com/watch?v=abcdefg" into SuperDuperVideoDownload box and hit enter
Present this user with a CLI like youtube-dl, and they'll complain that they don't like the idea of copy/pasting special strings into boxes.
youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults too; e.g. "youtube-dl https://......" will Just Work (TM). Switches are only needed for fancier stuff (e.g. "Download highest quality Free format and extract the audio track")
Let me tell you how it works now:
I've installed a download addon for them. Because they have no idea and before they install crap, I'll do it for them.
I did not explain anything nor did I tell them that I did install that addon.
They automatically clicked the red "download" icon under every youtube video they watch and it downloads the video.
So short: 1 step.
This is userfriendly and easy.
Probably not, but that doesn't really matter as it was never the intention (if it were, there's probably a better place to write it than Hacker News).
I was offering software developers a perspective which demonstrates that the GUI/CLI distinction is mostly artificial, and that a CLI doesn't automatically mean "hard to use". After all, as others have pointed out, people managed just fine on DOS back in the day (where "managed just fine" == "shouting at machine for not doing things right", just like today).
> This is userfriendly and easy.
I don't like applying the phrase "userfriendly" to a piece of software, as it depends just as much on the user.
For example, I'm a user of youtube-dl, and I find it incredibly userfriendly: when I use it in scripts, I just write "youtube-dl" followed by flags for the appropriate behaviour. In contrast, your solution sounds really unfriendly to me. First my script would need to open a browser, and since the downloader is part of an addon, I wouldn't be able to use PhantomJS like I usually would. Instead, I'd probably have to go off and learn Selenium, assuming that Selenium drivers can use browser addons? If not, I might have to write a custom XUL app (not done that in a while!), and make sure it's compatible with the addon. Does XUL even work on a headless machine (in my case, RaspberryPi with SSH access)?
So yes, it depends on the users just as well as your target group.
I'm not sure what your assumption that the difference is mostly artificial bases on since just the difference in the physical act is already overwhelming.
- Select browser icon
- Double click browser icon
- Click into search box
- Type "youtube"
- Disregard suggestions, hit enter
- Click on first thing that says YouTube
Still, the point is that it's not much different than running a commandline, e.g. something like:
- Click Gnome Do icon
- type "youtube-dl " and paste URL
- Click the "run" suggestion
- Click on Home launcher
- Watch filename until ".f123." bit disappears from the extension
not really, if you copy url of a clip in a playlist it will start downloading WHOLE playlist :(
Some people want to download the whole playlist when passing a URL from one of the videos (because otherwise it's hard to get an URL that contains just the playlist). Some other people just want to download the video they are currently watching.
That's why we have the --no-playlist option, which you can use and even stick in the configuration file. There's also --yes-playlist to override the configuration file if you need to.
Side-benefit: force care to be taken to be explicit if used in a script.
Personally, without reading any docs the first thing I did was paste in just a video ID (i.e. not the entire URL) so it seems natural to me that including both would be ambiguous.
Introducing breaking changes like this are no longer an option once your program has more than 5 users.
In addition, well-behaved command line programs aren't supposed to gratuitously prompt for input anyway.
One thing I always change from the default behaviour is video quality: by default it wastes a ton of bandwidth and disk space getting "HD" versions. I can understand why that's the default, but I don't particularly care about resolution, as it's a pretty negligible contributor to quality compared to the actual content of the video.
Are you sure that this is true? Starting many updates ago, but continuing into the present (I just updated to 2016.04.06 to be sure), I encountered a weird situation where
$ ./youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
$ ./youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE
$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
[youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading webpage
[youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Extracting video information
[youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading MPD manifest
WARNING: Requested formats are incompatible for merge and will be merged into mkv.
[download] Destination: True Detective - My Least Favorite Life - Lera Lynn Scene-wbKJt1NQtZE.f136.mp4
[download] 19.3% of 35.60MiB at 1.51MiB/s ETA 00:18
I just tried `youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE` and that works too. I didn't know the "v" parameter could be given like that!
EDIT: Very strange; I thought I'd give a try to what seemed a throwaway comment in your post, about quoting the string, and that fixed it. Thanks!
Without the double quotes (which seemed to be unnecessary for you), I still get:
$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
Usage: youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]
youtube-dl: error: You must provide at least one URL.
Type youtube-dl --help to see a list of all options.
$ echo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=wbKJt1NQtZE
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
$ echo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
zsh: no matches found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE $ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.3.42(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0)
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
$ echo a ? = =?
a =Are you sure you apprehend the differences between the look and feel of a browser and that of a command line?
Take, Chrome, flip it such that the input bar is on the bottom, and allow it to display console output as HTML.
Or, hell, keep it the way it is and just run the console HTML downward; why maintain the current terminal layout at all...
My mom did teach me DOS, and programming, and a lot of other things – but these days she doesn't have that kind of patience anymore. If things don't work right away, out the window they go. For a lot of people the patience with technology decreases as they age.
Now, if my hardware fails I just call tech support, I mostly use Windows, I almost never spend more than 5 minutes configuring anything, and any program I need to compile from sources is basically a no-no except if it's something I really need or can't avoid. In fact I'm so lazy that I tend not to install games that aren't on Steam, after being spoiled by Steam anything harder than double clicking to install game in each of my PCs seems like too much work to me.
In other aspects I don't think I'm so different from 15 years ago, this laziness with technology may be the aspect where I think age has manifested the most!
I'm inclined to agree with you though, except hard drive space is a lot cheaper these days, for about $10 I can have a 32 GB USB 3.0 thumb drive. Eventually the cheaper iPhone options should just carry a minimal 32GB if they decide to stop overcharging for more space. Videos and images are only going to increase in file size over the years to account for 4K adaptability, granted that might take quite a while.
It reminds me of a C64 TV ad of a student who had to drop out of college because he didn't have computer skills to be competitive (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDcZeGbElnM). Somehow, it all seems relevant now, as C64 gave me a start on programming.