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Comment by Double_a_92 | Hacker News Reader

I wish the installation was easier. It is reasonable to explain someone to write "youtube-dl -x <link>" to download music from youtube...

But having them installing ffmpeg and python, manually copying some exe to a safe place, and adding that as a enviroment variable really cuts the interest off.

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Might be the use-case for Chocolatey or something like that, if more than just youtube-dl is going to be used in console.

(Dunno which package managers are alright in Windows.)

Chocolatey is the way to go. Once you have it installed, it's just `choco install youtube-dl` and `choco install ffmpeg`.

This is how you get Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/install.

Chocolatey also bypasses all the dark parterns of download websites which is a big plus for a non technical user. I wish Microsoft would take it over and integrate it in windows by default.

You're describing the Windows Store.

Except the windows store was the toll protected, limited privilege applications, had to be developed for windows store, rather than a way to download and deploy any msi for major existing software.

I like https://scoop.sh/

    scoop install youtube-dl

That's because you're using Windows, which is really, really not designed with scripts in mind.

Point to Ubuntu in the Microsoft Store. Python is preinstalled. You may need to install Python's package manager (I'm not sure does it come preinstalled) with "sudo apt install python3-pip". Install it from Python's package manager with "pip3 install youtube-dl".

You could technically skip Python's package manager by just doing "sudo apt install youtube-dl", but updates are slow there, and you really don't want slow updates with this tool ("pip3 install --upgrade youtube-dl"). I'd argue that three commands are way easier to explain than installing two binaries and clicking around far too many times, especially because youtube-dl needs to be updated on a regular basis in order to work properly.

Did you honestly write this down thinking it was remotely any easier?

Then the alternative? Absolutely. The alternative requires finding the latest version of Python, installing it, modifying the environment path, finding the binary for youtube-dl, installing it, and only then figuring out how it works.

"Execute these commands only once and then just type youtube-dl https://example.com. If something breaks, run this command to upgrade the script and retry." If the target audience is someone who you think will feel comfortable doing youtube-dl in a terminal, you may as well point them to the total of three other commands to set things up.

AFAIR youtube-dl had an .exe build, I remember setting it up for my mom; it boiled down to unzipping an archive and telling here to drag URLs onto this icon. And the FFMpeg part; that was a PITA, and something she wouldn't have guessed on her own.

> Windows exe requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) and does not require Python that is already embedded into the binary.

Yeah, that makes sense. Things have changed since last time I went through that pain.

Funny how I've been using vb, python, perl and bash scripts. Windows for the past 20 years. I suppose that didn't happen?

Why do people who use Linux automatically think you cannot use scripts or there are no scripting languages on Windows?

I plan to package platform specific FFMpeg with the app especially now given the large initial interest. Then once I package everything for the different platforms via Electron it should be as easy as installing any other application an end-user would install, that's the hope.

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