Show HN: Interactively select the quality and format for youtube-dl
github.com
github.com
See more node cli tools at: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-nodejs#command-line-...
Don't take it personally though, I've done similar posts/comments in the past and it took me quite some time to realize comments with this tone can be discouraging for people just getting into software engineering.
So please continue creating awesome tools like this and share it with us all and don't be discouraged. We all love to see tools like this. :)
Why are you using meow? It seems like you are just using it to grab args and print help. Does it do something that is not immediately apparent? It has a lot of dependencies that might be completely useless for you.
log-symbols seems also completely useless dependency, you could just add the two symbols you are using by hand. Is it doing something special?
As for nodejs making things easier. Maybe it's just what you are used to. There isn't much code here, but I'm guessing node_modules is going to be pretty large. I think you could make this work just as well using any language. I guess the bonus here is that this is portable (compared to implementing with bash), but since youtube-dl (as far as I know) is made with Python, maybe it would have been better to make this TUI using Python as well since at least the user will have it installed.
I've got a mini project that a decent TUI would potentially work very well for.
[1] https://gist.github.com/pdkl95/0f963eae3612ecb104f233ca9eed4...
[2] https://github.com/v1cont/yad (yad is similar to zenity/{g,}dialog)
It automatically places videos in the configured folder based on type. Just type in an artist name, and select the type of video. Saves me a ton of time.
It's easy to extend and I plan to generalize it and translate it to bash sometime soon. I just do all of my media consumption in Windows currently.
That's a very nice interactive ui though
It has examples as well: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#format-selection-exam...
#!/bin/bash
OPTS="-o %(title)s.%(ext)s --console-title --restrict-filenames"
if [ "$#" -eq 2 ]; then
if [ "$2" -eq "251" ]; then
OPTS="$OPTS -x"
fi
echo youtube-dl $OPTS -f $2 $1
youtube-dl $OPTS -f $2 $1
else
echo youtube-dl -F $*
youtube-dl -F $*
echo
echo -n "Enter number: "
read fmt
youtube-dl $OPTS -f $fmt $*
fi
"${OPTS[@]}"
However, the youtube (and other sites id) and the format number will never contain spaces, so quoting isn't really needed here. If it gives peace of mind, sure.
Opened a PR to remove Lodash, emojis welcomed: https://github.com/synox/youtube-dl-interactive/pull/3
Indeed. :)
Plus youtube-dl already has multiple GUI/wrappers, so there's already a separation for interactive features.
This scares me a bit too, I watch basically all Youtube content via Youtube-dl. I have a script that runs every night on Mac, so that new content automagically appears in my Movies folder.
Fair warning, it’s quite macOS specific.
You could argue this is bad because it bypasses the distro release system, but then, Youtube also updates itself without the distro's approval, so the software that interfaces with it must as well.
Same thing happens with the newpipe android app which somehow manages to be far superior to Google's official YouTube app.
What needs to stay under the radar are the dozens of downloader sites and GUI apps that offer the same functionality and ten times the convenience.
Yes that's right, clicking 15 times for every single file is easier than having a script automatically download a series. ;)
youtube-dl being more known isn't that hazardous, as long as there's a community of people ready to confront the latest ballast sent to make people's lives more miserable - which there is so far, and I'm honestly incredibly grateful for that.
Unless it’s burnt into the video stream.
alias yt='youtube-dl --recode-video mp4'
alias yt='unset PYTHONPATH; youtube-dl --recode-video mp4'
For audio, I would just do a separate alias with a different name. For example (edit: tested):
alias yta='youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3'
Video:
yt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
yta https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKS8KsTC4IU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uQuX1sOYk4&list=PLYq_mcte9NvDA2Xi5Qjl1DrH5LuDKDlAI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uQuX1sOYk4
yta 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uQuX1sOYk4&list=PLYq_mcte9NvDA2Xi5Qjl1DrH5LuDKDlAI'Then this tool isn't for you. If you're gonna skip the whole point of the tool, you can't claim your code suggestions are equivalent.
f=/tmp/youtube-urls;sed 's/^/url=/'|exec curl -K-|exec grep -o "https%3A%2F%2Fr[0-9][a-zA-Z0-9.%_-]*"|exec sed -n 's/%26/\&/g;s/%3D/=/g;s/%3A/:/g;s/%2F/\//g;s/%3F/?/g;s/%25/%/g;w'"$f"'';case $1 in --help|-help|-h|-?)exec echo usage: echo youtube-url\|$0 \[fmt\] \[saveas\];;*) a=$(exec grep "itag=$1"\& $f 2>/dev/null);case ${#a} in 0) echo "the fmt (itag number \""$1"\") is not available. here are the available formats:";exec grep -o "itag=[0-9]*" $f;;*)exec curl -4o ${1-$c} $a;esac;esac
Once she has that knowledge, she will just be looking for the same itag numbers every time, e.g., 18 or 22 are popular for mp4.
This tool probably works anywhere node runs and the author didn't have to think about that, during the evening they took to write it.
Javascript became the cancer of the Internet.
Anyway, shell is more suitable for this kind of programs: you could write a bash script that ties together youtube-dl and dmenu or fzf or whatever within an hour.
Personally I'd probably go a similar approach as yourself but that's purely because I don't have node installed.
How do you define complexity threshold for something being worth sharing?
More to the point, why do you define that threshold? What benefit is there to saying someone's work that they're sharing has to be sufficiently complicated? Simple things can be immensely useful and well worth sharing.
On the contrary, I find that a lot of tools I'm happy to have are the trivials one.
Who have never used whoami for example ? It's two chained system calls, but I'm still glad it's baked in and I don't have to rewrite it everywhere I use it.
* Familiar syntax and semantics (Bash/Zsh/Fish/Csh/Ksh/Ash/Wtfsh are all way weirder than JS - and they are _only_ scripting languages, while JS is already everywhere)
* Standard library (https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v12.x/docs/api/fs.html) gives you access to POSIX APIs ("batteries included" - but not bloated)
* Sane packaging, package management, and ecosystem (overreliance on third-party module is a thing exactly because NPM works with much less friction than e.g. the Python situation)
* Asynchronous event model lets you safely do multiple things in parallel without worrying about low-level memory management, or which concurrency boilerplate library to use, etc.
All in all, it's the perfect Unix glue. All it misses is a mature S-expression-based syntax.
For example, take the problem of locking your encrypted partitions before suspending your Linux machine. Since distro developers are too "busy" to provide what one might say is basic functionality, power users took matters in their own hands and wrote this 100-ish line Bash script (https://github.com/vianney/arch-luks-suspend), which evolved into this 1500-ish line Go monstrosity (https://github.com/guns/go-luks-suspend)... as well as these ~75 lines of Node.js (https://github.com/egasimus/node-luks-suspend).
But yeah, sure, hurr durr JaavaaScriipt baad, 0.1+0.2!==0.3, 'true'==true, etc... The horror!
I'm not sure what you hope your posted comparisons show, but the Go "monstrosity" seems to have many more features than the Node one.
Line numbers are always a terrible metric for proving anything but in this case your especially abusing that data.
The Node example has zero external dependencies outside of the Node.js standard library.
There are as many exceptions to that rule are there are examples when it’s true. Code golfing, minifified code, shell 1 liners, Perl, etc.
Line counts mean jack shit.
But of course, scary symbols is scary.
All of your stated benefits are nice for the maintainer but mean little to the end user. This gushing praise for Node reads like nobody has ever built elegant CLI apps until Ryan Dahl turned of age and put JS on a server.
But your points are... Weird.
1. Familiar to people who know JavaScript, sure. But shell is the language you interact with the CLI with, so more people who use the CLI are familiar with a shell.
2. Most languages have a standard library.
3. I know many people who would disagree with you. Anyway, pip works fine in a Unix environment, which is what we're discussing here.
4. We're talking about glue code, right? Glue doesn't tend to be very parallel.
5. So, perfect Unix glue? Sure, you like it, and that's great for you! Keep on doing you. It's obviously capable of making nice tools, but so are most languages...
6. You luks-suspend example is weird because the Node.js code obviously does so much less than the other versions. I have no idea what the Go version is doing, but the shell version does things like remount the filesystem, handle udev, etc... A bash version of the JavaScript code would be shorter!
7. 0.1+0.2!=0.3 is a result of floating point arithmetic being floating point arithmetic. It's not specific to JavaScript.
2. Different languages' standard libraries have different scopes. Node's is just right for the task at hand.
3. I know many people who disagree with me, too. That doesn't make me wrong (or right ;-)).
4. Why not? Doing a task and displaying a rich progress indicator is doing two tasks. Glue is a continuum - for me, the concept includes orchestration of external "heavy lifting" tasks according to the desired logic, as well as processing intermediary outputs in simple ways so the whole pipeline fits together.
5. Well, I've evaluated it and found it to my liking. I guess you grow to like the tools you use to accomplish things, and if everyone who went out of their way to publicly dismiss Node.js instead went out of their way to use it in place of Bash scripting, they might find it to their liking as well.
6. Yet ironically, it has been the most reliable in achieving its purpose of locking my encrypted partitions when my computer goes to sleep, not to mention unlocking them when I wake it up.
7. Exactly - but people keep pulling this and other quirks out of their ass as "proof" JavaScript is some horrible language. Show me a shell scripting language that even has floating point arithmetic! But maybe glue code can't ever need that, either?
Python seems pretty popular.
> I know many people who disagree with me, too. That doesn't make me wrong
The problem isn't that you're saying node is well suited. The problem was your suggestion that node was uniquely well suited when actually the CLI is a solved problem in most languages.
> Well, I've evaluated it and found it to my liking.
That's all that really matters when it comes to your own personal usage. Just don't expect everyone to have those same preferences nor argue with other developers that your preferences are any kind of "fact".
> I guess you grow to like the tools you use to accomplish things, and if everyone who went out of their way to publicly dismiss Node.js instead went out of their way to use it in place of Bash scripting, they might find it to their liking as well.
Personally I don't like node and find Bash easier however it's thankfully not an "either/or" argument where your only options are Javascript or Bash. There's a whole plethora of options out there.
> Yet ironically, it has been the most reliable in achieving its purpose of locking my encrypted partitions when my computer goes to sleep, not to mention unlocking them when I wake it up.
That's a pretty meaningless anecdote because it could be the result of a whole plethora of reasons outside of the language's control (including but not limited to user error) or even completely made up (like your point about floating point arithmetic (see below) or your other comment about one liners being more readable than multi-lined code).
> Show me a shell scripting language that even has floating point arithmetic!
Quite a few do: ksh93, yash, zsh and murex (disclaimer: I wrote that shell) are all interactive shells which support floating point arithmetic.
In terms of shell scripting languages, you can add the following to the above group: awk, bc, dc and perl.
Even those shells that don't support floating point arithmetic can still do pseudo floating point maths by using powers of 10 multipliers and printf to place the decimal point:
printf %.10f\\n "$((1000000000 * 365/7))e-9"
bc <<< "scale=10; 365/7"
One reason it's so popular: even though it skips the actual curly brackets (thus making itself more accessible), it doesn't stray too far from the general syntactic paradigm of "curly-bracket languages'" - even though I've also seen people being alienated by the idea of "significant whitespace", again for no other reason but that it "seems wrong" to them.
> The problem was your suggestion that node was uniquely well suited
No, just much better suited than people give it credit for. And this ecosystem brings new things to the table, too.
> when actually the CLI is a solved problem in most languages.
Being able to build a CLI at all? I guess, sure. Being able to quickly build an accessible CLI? Hardly so. Everything in the area of HCI is in flux, and gatekeeping the CLI domain for does more harm than good. Btw do you know anyone doing this sort of interface before Yeoman? https://github.com/synox/youtube-dl-interactive/raw/master/d.... before JS.
> There's a whole plethora of options out there.
Which is why you've got to take into account opportunity cost, choice paralysis, etc. All of the options out there are positively fascinating, but if I have the options to solve problems in multiple contexts with the same familiar tool, I tend to usually go for it.
> Quite a few do: ksh93, yash, zsh and murex (disclaimer: I wrote that shell) are all interactive shells which support floating point arithmetic.
None of which are POSIX, or common defaults?
> In terms of shell scripting languages, you can add the following to the above group: awk, bc, dc
None of which are shells - they're DSLs you can call into from the shell.
> perl
Again, not really a shell. Though I wouldn't be surprised if anyone's using it as one.
> bc <<< "scale=10; 365/7" > 365/7
Even though these tools have a good reason to be like this, having to _research_ how to _call out to an external executable_ to do something as trivial as floating point division (in the sense of "cmon man I can do this in my head, why does is it have to be so hard to tell a computer to do it") is hardly on anyone's list of priorities.
At this point, nearly anyone would rather reach for the scripting language they're already familiar with, rather than learn an unfamiliar one just because it has historically dominated the problem domain.
> one liners being more readable than multi-lined code
Admittedly, that was a pretty bullshit argument. Not any less nuanced than "[l]ine counts mean jack shit", either - I take it as a general rule that one would prefer to write less code.
And I'm not weighing any of the examples against "[c]ode golfing, minifified code, shell 1 liners, Perl, etc. I didn't really take into account the extra functionality of the Go version - it was just as unreliable as the Bash one so I quickly discarded it when I found something that worked.
There's a story behind this comparison. It was likely user error, in the sense I failed to prepare my initramfs correctly using mkinitcpio or dracut (incidentally, both of those being shell scripts - insufficiently documented and not very readable to my untrained eye, either) But the JavaScript version worked for me because it didn't even try to chroot into the initramfs - it just moves a tiny handful of required binaries into a ramdisk, and works from that.
Since that solution _works_, I am hard pressed not to commend its minimalism. Is it inconceivable that that the author was not more clever, but the tools that they used enabled them to come up with a simpler solution in the time that would've otherwise been spent googling `bc` or poring over the sources of initramfs builders?
All you're describing there is structured programming languages. Of course people like structured languages, that's why nearly every single programming language developed in the last 40 years (that isn't designed to interface directly with hardware) is structured. Even languages of entirely different paradigms such as Common Lisp, LOGO, Prolog, MATLAB and Forth all support structured control flows. Even BASIC - for all it's warts - supported structured logic (even if many implementations lacked proper functions).
So you're not making a convincing argument about curly braces now you've redefined the argument as structured control flows.
> No, just much better suited than people give it credit for. And this ecosystem brings new things to the table, too.
Maybe. My personal opinion is the unmanageable nest of unvetted dependencies makes it a worse solution than people give it credit for. As a pure dev tool for personal use, go for it. But I don't want to read 10k+ lines of code in the dependencies of a tool that's ostensibly just an interactive alias.
I get the whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing but it's gotten out of hand with node. Half the time even people writing code in node don't know what dependencies their dependencies are pulling in. All that trust placed in an ecosystem that is very easy to abuse (and has been abused too). So no thanks, I don't think that's the right tool for serious CLI work which often needs to be run on trusted machines.
> Being able to build a CLI at all? I guess, sure. Being able to quickly build an accessible CLI? Hardly so.
Actually yes. I've been writing software for 30 year in well over a dozen different languages. Much, not all but a reasonable amount of that, was writing software for servers.
> Everything in the area of HCI is in flux
Not in terms of the CLI. We're using the same standards that were defined in the 60s. If anything, the problem with the CLI is that it's engineered around design principles which are no longer relevant to modern terminals. For example:
* we no longer need to inline formatting with escape sequences - we have better markups for that.
* ASCII is no longer relevant in our international community with different writing languages and character sets.
* Terminals are no longer teletypes - there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to inline multimedia content
* Terminals are no longer teletypes - we shouldn't need to be defining TTYs/PTYs as an OS abstraction
* Defining TTYs is OS specific and a fucking mess on even some of the better designed UNIXes
* Capturing and sending signals can often be OS specific and a fucking mess to work with on even some of the better designed UNIXes
* Not all OSs even support the same suite of signals
* Signal hotkeys can't even be redefined - which means you can't always compensate for one OS missing a signal that another might have. The best you can do is enable or disable the capture of that hotkey on the TTY. Which again requires OS specific syscalls
* POSIX pipes are just byte streams. Which makes working with structured data a fucking nightmare (hence why Powershell, jq and murex all exist)
* stderr is a lousy way of capturing errors
* in fact error handling on the whole is just terrible on POSIX shells (hence why murex exists)
* POSIX shells don't support any kind of unit testing (again, hence why murex exists)
* exit numbers are a half arsed solution
* named pipes are a file system kludge
* TTY modes can get broken if a fork()ed process changes the mode and crashes for forgets to reset it on exit. Meaning your shell then becomes non-functional without manually fork()ing `reset`
* ANSI escape sequences are anything but standardised. With different terminal emulators often doing significantly different things
So no, the CLI definitely is not in a state of flux. The exact opposite of that in fact.
More likely is the Javascript libraries you're using for CLI work is in a constant state of flux. This was a problem I had when I used to write software in node and it's one of many personal reasons I decided against using it for anything I really cared about.
> Which is why you've got to take into account opportunity cost, choice paralysis, etc. All of the options out there are positively fascinating, but if I have the options to solve problems in multiple contexts with the same familiar tool, I tend to usually go for it.
That makes no sense. Last week you were saying it couldn't be done and now you're saying the problem is too much choice. Make your mind up.
> [ksh93, yash, zsh and murex] None of which are POSIX, or common defaults?
You didn't say "POSIX shells", you said "shell scripting languages"
Also node isn't a common default either.
> [Perl] Again, not really a shell. Though I wouldn't be surprised if anyone's using it as one.
Again you didn't say "POSIX shells", you said "shell scripting languages". You can very much use Perl as a shell scripting language (and that is in fact still a common use case for it).
> Even though these tools have a good reason to be like this, having to _research_ how to _call out to an external executable_ to do something as trivial as floating point division (in the sense of "cmon man I can do this in my head, why does is it have to be so hard to tell a computer to do it") is hardly on anyone's list of priorities.
Actually computers can't do proper floating point arithmetic (in the sense that humans do) either. That's why a lot of languages (and spreadsheets too) demonstrate seemingly broken logic when comparing floating point numbers.
> Admittedly, that was a pretty bullshit argument. Not any less nuanced than "[l]ine counts mean jack shit", either - I take it as a general rule that one would prefer to write less code.
Line counts literally do mean jack shit. There are plenty of examples of where more lines equal better code. As a developer you should already know this.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
So I understand the sentiment.
As for shell scripts, they are a thing, and this thing is one (just written in node rather than bash.)
command -h # or --help