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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone is familiar or comfortable with the command line.

A lot of my friends don't use youtube-dl for this exact reason. They end up messaging me, asking me to download files for them.

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Why not just create a simple phone number with twilio that they can text a url to and then it fires a script to download that video and upload it to s3 for them? Shouldn’t take more than an hour IMO.

Mainly because I actually like talking to my friends, and I'm often interested in whatever video/music they want me to download for them.

I have no desire to automate my interactions with my friends, especially for something that's easy enough for me to do and only takes a minute of my time.

You could just look at the logs to see what kind of stuff they download. And since they know it’s automated they will likely download even more stuff. If you see something interesting then maybe you can start a conversation with them at that point.

If it wasn't for the copyright infringement this wouldn't be a bad business idea.

One video per day is free - if you want extra "credits" pay for it on the website.

It doesn’t really matter, if you get a dmca takedown just delete that file. But I doubt you will, especially if it’s just your friends hosting it.

I understand this too, but being on HN, familiarity with the CLI probably can be taken for granted. For all the other people this will stop them from using shady sites, but even some of them might like to have some more options included in such program... For the current feature-level there is 0 reason to do a bloated electron app - just do your 100 lines of code with tray integration for all the major OS (with a GUI) (Java might even have systray integration)

There's already a bunch of websites that do this if they can't use youtube-dl -- why are they messaging you when they can literally go to one of these sites and paste the URL in to get the video?

If you’ve trained a computer illiterate person well, they will not go to sketchy ad-ridden websites and download files to their PC and double click them.

Name 1 which works flawlessly. No ads. On a side note, is it possible to port this CLI program to Android or web? My mom needs a downloader and the Firefox ext which I used till now , doesn't work all the time.

install termux, install youtube-dl, define a "handler"-script, share the link with termux

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