yt-dlp GUI: a free graphical interface for Mac, Windows and Linux

If you have ever searched for a yt-dlp GUI, you already know what yt-dlp does. It is the command line tool that downloads video and audio from more than a thousand sites, handles every weird streaming format the web has invented, and is updated fast enough to survive YouTube's constant changes. It is also a program with several hundred command line flags and no window.

A GUI does not make yt-dlp more capable. It makes it usable by people who do not want to keep a cheat sheet of format selectors open in another tab. That is the whole pitch, and it is worth being honest that this is a convenience layer, not an upgrade.

What a GUI actually changes

Three things get meaningfully easier, and they are all about state that the command line forces you to hold in your head.

Format selection stops being a syntax problem

To download 1080p with merged audio from the command line, you write something like yt-dlp -f "bv*[height<=1080]+ba/b[height<=1080]/b" URL. That string is doing real work: prefer the best video stream at or below 1080p plus the best audio, fall back to the best combined stream at that height, fall back again to whatever exists. It is elegant and it is also completely opaque the first time you see it.

A GUI runs --dump-json first, reads back every format the site actually offers, and shows you a list of resolutions with estimated file sizes next to each one. You click 1080p. The app writes the selector. Same result, no memorisation, and crucially you can see beforehand that the 4K version is 283 MB and the 1080p version is 51 MB.

Queues become visible

Downloading forty videos from the command line means either one very long shell loop or forty terminal invocations. When item twelve fails because the uploader deleted it, you find out either at the very end or not at all.

A GUI with a proper queue shows each item's state, keeps going after a failure, and lets you retry just the ones that broke. ArcDLP treats this as a design principle rather than a feature: one failure never stops the rest, and every item ends in a state you can see.

Sign-in stops involving cookie files

Age restricted, private and members-only content needs cookies. From the terminal that means exporting a Netscape cookie file from your browser with an extension, saving it somewhere, and passing --cookies /path/to/cookies.txt on every call. It works and it is genuinely annoying.

A GUI can open a real browser window pointed at the site's own login page, capture the session cookies itself, and pass them to yt-dlp behind the scenes. Your password goes to the site directly. The app only ever sees the resulting session cookie.

What you give up

Worth stating plainly, because most comparison pages skip it. A GUI is a curated subset. If you need --download-archive to skip previously fetched videos, SponsorBlock segment removal, custom output templates, rate limiting, chapter splitting or a proxy, the command line still wins and probably always will. No graphical front end is going to expose several hundred flags without becoming worse than the terminal it replaced.

The sensible split is: GUI for the eighty percent of downloads that are "give me this at this quality," terminal for anything scripted, scheduled or unusual. Plenty of people happily use both.

The options in 2026

The yt-dlp front end space is small but real. Broadly you are choosing between three shapes.

Shape	What it means	Trade-off
Bundled desktop app	Ships yt-dlp and ffmpeg inside the installer. One download, nothing else.	Bigger installer. Engine updates arrive with app updates.
Thin wrapper	Expects you to install yt-dlp and ffmpeg, then points at the binaries.	Smaller, always current, but you are back to installing things.
Web front end	Runs yt-dlp on someone else's server and hands you a file.	Nothing to install, but your URLs and traffic go through a third party.

ArcDLP is the first shape. It bundles yt-dlp, ffmpeg and Deno, is MIT licensed on GitHub, and runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. Other options in this space worth knowing about include Stacher, VidBee and the older JDownloader 2, which is a general download manager rather than a yt-dlp front end specifically.

How ArcDLP maps the flags

It is a thin, deliberate mapping. Roughly everything the interface does corresponds to something you could type yourself.

In the app	What it runs
Clicking Fetch	--dump-json --no-playlist
Picking 1080p	-f "bv*[height<=1080]+ba/b[height<=1080]/b"
Picking MP3	-x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0
Codec set to AV1	-S vcodec:av01 --merge-output-format mp4
Pasting a playlist URL	--flat-playlist --dump-json
Signing in to YouTube	--cookies /tmp/arcdlp-cookies.txt

The codec setting is worth calling out because it is easy to get wrong. ArcDLP expresses codec preference through --format-sort rather than a hard [vcodec^=...] filter. The difference matters: a hard filter makes the download fail outright when a site does not offer your codec, while a sort preference just falls through to the next best option and tells you in the log. YouTube caps H.264 at 1080p, so anyone picking H.264 and then asking for 4K would hit that constantly.

Getting started

1. Download ArcDLP for Mac, Windows or Linux. There is nothing to install alongside it.
2. Open it and clear the one-time unsigned app warning. Each platform guide shows the exact screens.
3. Paste a video URL and click Fetch. Metadata and the quality list appear.
4. Pick a resolution, or switch to the audio section for MP3, M4A or Opus, then click Add to Queue.
5. Watch the log panel. It streams the same output yt-dlp writes to a terminal, so you can always see exactly what is happening.

If you want the wider feature picture rather than the yt-dlp angle specifically, the ArcDLP overview covers playlists, the download queue and codec selection in more detail.

FAQ