youtube-dl

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 8 years (2016–2023), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with youtube-dl, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 12 complaints

Original tool is very slow, nearly unusable for mass downloads2023-04-13
Default best-format options pick low-quality encodings, so users must hand-write long format lists2022-04-17
Requires learning the CLI, installing libraries, and figuring out settings, hard for non-technical users2021-11-01
Channel scraping is clunky and slow to use2021-10-22
Unclear if app works on macOS; may break standard drag and drop and accessibility2021-09-10
Failed downloads don't explain why; the error is only visible in logs2021-09-10
Using the command prompt is unwieldy for daily downloading2021-01-05
Users can't find the open issue a closed duplicate points to, and get no reply2020-08-28
Downloading a video takes many manual steps: copy URL, open terminal, change folder, paste2019-09-19
Downloading via SSH takes many steps and waiting for the download is tedious2019-07-02
Console .exe with ffmpeg is too painful for a non-technical user2019-07-02
Installing and running it requires many confusing steps a nontechnical user would get lost in2016-04-08