I’m sure a lot of people on Lemmy can figure out package managers, but I wanted to try writing a guide more aimed at beginners that can be shared with people trying to figure out yt-dlp. I only found one other guide like this outside of random Reddit threads and comments, and it was pretty long and technical.

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In Windows I use the tartube gui for yt-dlp which works fine for me.

This is de wey. Chocolatey also helps install all sorts of other useful stuff, like cURL, FFMPEG, NodeJS, and other things that might not have binary releases or installers available for them.

Why not use JDownloader?

On Android, from FDroid you can install an app called Seal, which is a minimal frontend for yt-dlp. I discovered it while trying to circumvent issues Newpipe was having with some update to the YouTube API.

Unlike Newpipe forks, which can use the sponsor block API but not when downloading the video directly to your device, Seal allows you to input the custom flags available from the yt-dlp cli, so you can automatically skip annoying sponsor mentions even on your downloaded videos.