ClipGrab

ClipGrab was a GUI frontend for youtube-dl. Now, it's a GUI frontend for yt-dlp.

Besides downloading clips, FFmpeg is utilized to convert to other video or audio formats.

See below for instructions, if you are building yourself.

Prebuilt AppImage Download images are available and recommended.

You'll need to make the AppImage executable, then you can run it:

# Set version of ClipGrab.  As of Oct 31, 2021 latest version is 3.9.7
CLIPGRAB_VER=3.9.7

# Change directory to ~/Downloads and download latest AppImage
cd ~/Downloads
wget "https://download.clipgrab.org/ClipGrab-${CLIPGRAB_VER}-x86_64.AppImage"

# Make downloaded AppImage executable
chmod +x "ClipGrab-${CLIPGRAB_VER}-x86_64.AppImage"

# Run it!
./ClipGrab-${CLIPGRAB_VER}-x86_64.AppImage

Keyboard Shortcuts

A few keyboard shortcuts might ease usage:

Ctrl+1: switch to Download Tab
Ctrl+2: switch to Settings Tab
Ctrl+3: switch to About Tab
Ctrl+V: paste Clipboard contents into the Download-URL field
Ctrl+F / F: popup Format combobox
Ctrl+Q / Q: popup Quality combobox
Ctrl+G / G: starts grabbing if ready or pastes Clipboard contents into the Download-URL field

F / Q / G : The Control modifier Ctrl is necessary, if the focus is inside the text field.

YouTube Downloader

ClipGrab does utilize the YouTube Downloader. As described in https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Forks on 2022-09-19, there are 3 active forks:

youtube-dl - The original. Also, see youtube-dl
yt-dlp - This one is currently used in ClipGrab
ytdl-patched - A fork of yt-dlp

Compilation & Translation

This sources on github are customized and modified - compared to the prebuilt download of ClipGrab (http://clipgrab.org/).

Prerequisites

You need to install the Qt5 developer libraries and programs in order to compile the program.

On Ubuntu and Debian-based system, you can install the necessary libraries like this:

sudo apt install qtbase5-dev qtwebengine5-dev

Updating/editing translations additionally requires:

sudo apt install qttools5-dev-tools

Other Linux distributions might have slightly different package names. Packages for Windows and macOS can be downloaded here: https://download.qt.io/archive/qt/5.12/ or here: https://www.qt.io/offline-installers

In addition, ffmpeg (no developer libs necessary) and python3 (for yt-dlp) needs to be installed:

sudo apt install ffmpeg python3

For updating ffmpeg from https://github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds following packages are needed:

sudo apt install tar xz-utils

To install all prerequisites:

sudo apt install qtbase5-dev qtwebengine5-dev qttools5-dev-tools ffmpeg python3 tar xz-utils

Compilation

To compile ClipGrab, simply execute the following command:

qmake clipgrab.pro && make

This will create an executable "clipgrab" that you can start via ./clipgrab.

Translation

When texts were edited in the source files, lupdate is to be run to update the .ts files before editing - after the qmake step:

qmake clipgrab.pro
lupdate clipgrab.pro

Then, translations can be edited with linguist opening the .ts files.

lrelease compiles the .ts files into binary .qm, finalizing the translation:

lrelease clipgrab.pro

The binary needs rebuilding to embed the resource files into the executable:

make

Installation

The built binary executable can simply be copied. It does contain all necessary resources (translations and images):

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cp clipgrab ~/.local/bin/

For system-wide installation:

sudo cp clipgrab /usr/local/bin/

If a suitable YouTube-Downloader is found, it's used. When missing or the version is outdated, it can be downloaded.

Configuration / Update

It shouldn't be necessary, but the the configuration file can be found here (for Linux):

$HOME/.config/ClipGrab/ClipGrab.conf

You can edit it manually - or delete it. To prevent write collisions, ClipGrab should be closed for editing.

The downloaded and installed YouTube-Downloader is saved here:

$HOME/.local/share/ClipGrab/ClipGrab/yt-dlp

The exact filename is also displayed at the bottom of the 'About' tab with it's version. Rename or delete that file, to enforce an update of the downloader, at next startup.

hayguen/clipgrab