A clean desktop GUI for yt-dlp. Paste a URL, pick a quality, queue it. Trim clips, extract MP3s, grab subtitles, batch a whole list — $24 once, no subscription.
Reelsnag wraps the excellent open-source yt-dlp project in a friendly dark-mode desktop app: a download queue with real progress bars, per-job trim/MP3/subtitle options, and batch import from a text file. No account, no monthly fee, no ads.
Don't want to run it from source? Grab the packaged Windows installer (one-time purchase, lifetime updates):
→ https://whop.com/onetime-suite
The source here is MIT-licensed and always will be — the installer is just the convenient, pre-packaged version.
Reelsnag is a GUI for the open-source yt-dlp project, intended for personal use: downloading your own uploads, content you have rights to, Creative Commons / public-domain media, and material the platform's terms permit you to download. Respect each platform's Terms of Service and copyright law. Don't use it to redistribute or pirate content.
In practice that means: creators backing up their own uploaded videos, archivists saving Creative Commons or public-domain footage, and offline access to material a platform's own terms allow you to download. It is not a tool for mass-ripping other people's copyrighted content — that's on you to avoid, and it's against most platforms' terms anyway.
- 🔗 Paste a URL → probe — fetches title, thumbnail, duration, uploader, and every available format via
yt-dlp -J - 📊 Format/quality picker — grouped by resolution, audio-only option, "best" default, automatic video+audio merge via ffmpeg when needed
- 📥 Download queue — multiple jobs, sequential-by-default (1–3 concurrent), live progress/speed/ETA, pause-as-cancel, retry, remove, open-in-folder
- ✂️ Trim — optional start/end trim per job, fast stream-copy with an automatic accurate re-encode fallback
- 🎵 Extract MP3 — audio-only downloads with a bitrate picker (128/192/320 kbps)
- 💬 Subtitles — download available subs or auto-captions as
.srtalongside the video - 📋 Batch mode — paste a list of URLs or load a
.txtfile (one URL per line), enqueue them all at once - ⚙️ Settings — output folder, filename template, default quality, concurrency, default subtitle languages
- 🔄 Self-updating engine — one-click "Update yt-dlp" because extractors break and yt-dlp ships fixes weekly
- 🕘 History — every completed download recorded locally, jump straight to the file
git clone https://github.com/bensblueprints/clip-grabber
cd clip-grabber
npm i
npm startOn first use the app downloads two things (with a visible progress bar), then everything runs offline:
- yt-dlp.exe — the current release, straight from
github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases - ffmpeg — bundled via the
ffmpeg-staticnpm package (no separate install)
Neither binary is committed to this repo — they're fetched on first run, exactly like the whisper-transcriber app in this same suite.
| Reelsnag | Typical "downloader" subscription service | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $24 one-time | $10–15/month |
| Cost after 1 year | $24 | $120–180 |
| Runs locally | Yes — nothing leaves your machine | No — video is proxied through their servers |
| Format/quality control | Full yt-dlp format list | Usually locked to a few presets |
| Batch downloads | Yes, from a queue or .txt file | Often a paid tier |
| Trim / MP3 / subtitles | Built in | Rare, or paywalled |
| Engine updates | One-click "Update yt-dlp" | Depends on their backend |
| Account required | No | Yes |
Pays for itself in under 2 months versus a $12/mo converter subscription.
- Electron — main + preload + renderer, plain HTML/CSS/JS (no framework bloat)
- yt-dlp — the actively-maintained fork of youtube-dl, downloaded from official GitHub releases on first run
- ffmpeg-static — bundled ffmpeg handles merging, trimming, and MP3 extraction
- JobQueue (
src/lib/queue.js) — a plain-Node queue module with persisted state (queue.json), decoupled from Electron so it's independently unit-testable
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
npm start |
Launch the app |
npm test |
Network-independent-by-default smoke test — downloads the real yt-dlp binary, generates a local ffmpeg test fixture, trims it, extracts MP3, exercises the queue (sequential execution, cancel, retry) and the progress parser. Set SMOKE_LIVE=1 to additionally run a live probe against a known CC-licensed video. |
npm run dist |
Build the Windows NSIS installer (electron-builder) |
No telemetry, no analytics, no accounts. The only network calls are the one-time yt-dlp binary download (GitHub) and whatever URL you explicitly paste in — both clearly surfaced in the UI. Downloaded files and history live in your local app-data folder.
MIT © 2026 Ben (bensblueprints)