Simple video downloader Autor: Disco🕺Dave

• 🚀Simple lets you use a toolbar button (or context menu) to easily download videos (or audio only) from Reddit, YouTube, X, SoundCloud, TED and many more sites
• Best quality video and best quality audio are merged into MKV or MP4 – there's a trade-off between the two which is explained in the popup
• You can limit the maximum resolution to 1080p with a checkbox – uncheck it if you want 1440p and above ... but be aware that you're going to get the highest resolution available right up to 8K Full Ultra HD at 7680×4320 - like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2tNYfjcKfc
• Audio-only downloads are saved as MP3 with best quality audio
• Click the icon and choose audio or video; it's very convenient
• Right-click a link to download a video (or its audio only) without visiting the link
• That works even for Reddit "comments" URLs like this:
  https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/88ll08/this_is_what_happens_when_one_company_owns_dozens/
• Download complete YouTube playlists
• It also works on a ton of other sites – try it here, for example: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/liverpool-players-celebrate-watch-video-winning-premier-league-title-epl-a9586381.html – that's a normal news website, not a video site like YouTube, but there's an embedded video there … so when you're anywhere on that page, click the 🚀Simple icon, click Download video and Bob's your uncle
• Downloads from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X/Twitter will have the video ID appended to the filename – to avoid file name clashes when the name can't be retrieved
• Doing most of the hard work in the background is yt-dlp
• Designed to be quick and easy to use (no pasting links needed) and to succeed where some others fail

🚀Simple automatically embeds (when available):

• Thumbnail
• Metadata – including YouTube description
• Chapters and chapter names
• SponsorBlock segments as named chapters, to make it easier to skip sponsor segments, ads, intros and filler
• Subtitles – press V in VLC media player to toggle subtitles on and off
• Synchronised lyrics in MP3 files – for audio-only downloads, subtitles are embedded with timestamps in the ID3 tag [in the UNSYNCEDLYRICS field, for reasons] … that means that if it's a music video with lyrics as subtitles, you'll get synchronised lyrics embedded in your mp3 file that will display in most media players … and if it's spoken word, you'll have a synchronised transcript
• (Auto-generated subtitles are not embedded)

First use

One-time, simple setup. You're going to be running a local Python server. You do have to install a few (open-source) things – that will work silently and invisibly in the background. Clear instructions will open in a new tab when you add 🚀Simple to Firefox.

Here's why each component is needed:
 

• Python: Powers the server that processes download requests
• yt-dlp and its dependencies like mutagen and curl_cffi: yt-dlp downloads video/audio from various websites with optimal quality – mutagen embeds synchronised subtitles in mp3 files – curl_cffi impersonates browser fingerprints to avoid CAPTCHAs and download throttling
• FFmpeg: Handles video/audio conversion, merging and format manipulation
• MKVToolNix: Adds chapter information and handles MKV container operations

Each tool handles a specific part of the download and processing pipeline, working together, silently and in the background, to create feature-rich video and audio downloads.

Permissions

🚀Simple needs these three permissions. Here's what they actually mean:

Access your data for sites in localhost domains

• This only lets it talk to the small server script running on your own computer
• localhost means "this computer" – it can't access any other computers or servers
• It can't see any other websites or data

Display notifications to you

• This is just for showing download started/finished messages
• It only shows notifications about downloads you initiated
• You can disable these in your browser settings if you want

Access browser tabs

• This is needed to get the URL of the video you want to download
• It only gets the URL when you click to download
• It can't see any other tab information or browsing history

🚀Simple is "serverless" - it doesn't send any data anywhere except between your browser and your own computer (localhost). I couldn't track you even if I wanted to (I don't), since everything happens locally on your machine.

Love, light and peace.

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to the developers of, and everyone who has contributed to:
 

• yt-dlp - The powerful YouTube-DL fork that powers the video and audio downloads
• Python - The programming language that runs the server-side downloading component
• FFmpeg - Essential multimedia framework that handles video/audio format conversion and processing
• MKVToolNix - Tools that embed chapters and process Matroska container files
• mutagen - Library that embeds synchronised lyrics/transcripts into MP3 files from video subtitles
• curl_cffi - Browser fingerprint impersonation that helps avoid CAPTCHAs and download throttling
• SponsorBlock - Provides ad segment data that gets embedded as chapters for easy skipping
• subprocess - Module that executes and manages the external tools like FFmpeg and MKVToolNix
• re - Pattern matching that extracts information from video pages and parses subtitles
• http.server - Creates the local web server to communicate between browser and downloader
• urllib.parse - Handles URL processing and parameter extraction
• json - Processes settings and download metadata
• os - Manages file operations and path handling
• unicodedata - Normalises special characters in filenames
• difflib - Performs fuzzy matching for downloaded files
• shutil - Handles high-level file operations like moving completed downloads
• tempfile - Creates temporary directories for download processing
• socket - Manages network port allocation for the server
• datetime - Formats timestamps for download completion messages
• traceback - Generates clean error reports for troubleshooting
• pathlib - Provides cross-platform path manipulation for download folders
• random - Creates randomised delays between downloads to avoid rate limiting
• platform - Detects OS type to use appropriate user agents and paths

Icons

• Space shuttle icons created by Freepik - Flaticon
• Launch icons created by Freepik - Flaticon