You find a video. You want to keep it — for offline viewing, for archiving, for that one tutorial you know you’ll need again in six months when you’ve forgotten everything. So you search “how to download YouTube video” and end up with two options: a browser extension that also wants to reroute your search engine, or a command-line tool that expects you to already know what a “codec” is.
There’s a third option, and it doesn’t require either a leap of faith or a computer science degree.
The two paths everyone tries first
Browser extensions are the path of least resistance, which is exactly the problem. Half of them are held together with ads, the other half quietly install a toolbar you didn’t ask for. The good ones exist, but finding them is its own research project.
yt-dlp, on the other hand, is genuinely excellent — actively maintained, absurdly capable, and free. It just assumes you’re comfortable typing commands with flags like --merge-output-format into a terminal and reading the results as plain text. Which is fine, if that’s your idea of a relaxing evening. For everyone else, it’s a wall.
Tip
Tip: If you’ve ever thought “I just want a window with buttons,” you’re not missing something obvious — you’re just not the target audience for a command-line tool. That’s a UI problem, not a you problem.
Grabbit: the same engine, minus the wall
Grabbit wraps yt-dlp — the same engine mentioned above — in an actual desktop app. Paste a link, pick your format, hit download. No flags to memorize, no terminal window to stare at.
It’s free, open source (MIT licensed), and runs on Linux and Windows. Since it’s built on yt-dlp under the hood, it inherits support for YouTube, Dailymotion, and roughly a thousand other sites — basically anywhere yt-dlp can reach, Grabbit can reach too.
Here’s the whole workflow, start to finish.
Step 1: Install FFmpeg (the one and only terminal moment)
Grabbit needs FFmpeg on your system to merge video and audio into a single file. This is the one step that still involves a command line — after this, you’re done with it for good.
Linux (Ubuntu / Debian / Mint):
sudo apt install ffmpegWindows:
winget install ffmpegGrabbit detects FFmpeg automatically once it’s installed — from your PATH or the usual install locations. No configuration, no pointing it to a folder.
Step 2: Download Grabbit
Grab the build for your system from the GitHub releases page:
- Linux — a portable AppImage, no installation, no root permissions needed
- Windows — a portable
.zip, extract and run
yt-dlp comes bundled inside — nothing else to download separately.
Step 3: Paste a link, pick a format
Open Grabbit, paste a video URL, and it analyses the link automatically. You’ll get independent controls for:
- Video — quality and codec
- Audio — format and quality
- Subtitles — language and format (or skip them entirely)
Choose your output container — MP4 or MKV — and add it to the queue.
Step 4: Do the same for an entire playlist
Paste a playlist URL instead of a single video, and Grabbit expands it automatically, letting you set the format per entry — so you’re not stuck applying one setting to forty videos when you only wanted 1080p for three of them.
Note
This is where things quietly stop feeling like “downloading a video” and start feeling like “archiving a whole course, discography, or conference.” That escalation is entirely normal. We won’t tell anyone.
Step 5: Let the queue do the waiting
The download queue is the part of Grabbit that does the actual work while you go make coffee:
- Downloads run concurrently, not one painful item at a time
- Pause and resume individually or for the whole queue
- The queue persists across restarts — close the app, reopen it, everything’s still there
- If something fails, one click retries it — no re-adding, no re-configuring
Bonus: for when you do want the flags
If you’re the kind of person who actually likes yt-dlp’s advanced options — rate limiting, cookies, proxy support, a specific obscure flag you swear by — Grabbit exposes them through an optional advanced panel. You can save your favourite combination as a named preset and reuse it, instead of retyping the same eleven flags every time.
Best of both worlds: the terminal power, minus the terminal.
Warning
A quick word on doing this responsibly: downloading is easy, respecting copyright and each platform’s terms of service is still on you. Grabbit is a tool, not a legal opinion — use it for content you actually have the right to save (your own uploads, Creative Commons material, personal backups where allowed, and so on).
That’s it
Paste. Pick. Download. No terminal, no toolbar you didn’t ask for, no mystery extension quietly changing your homepage.
Get Grabbit on GitHub — free, open source, Linux and Windows.