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What we present to you today is an excellent, project-based tool yt-dlp to be able to easily download audio or video from YouTube and many other similar sites. For those who don't know yt-dlp it's a Fork of the very famous project youtube-dl. Today's application is called Seal and is available exclusively for Android.
If you have never heard of these projects there is no problem. As always we are ready to explain everything to you to make you better understand what we are talking about. youtube-dl is indeed a huge project, Open source and free, which has existed for more than 15 years now 1.
youtube-dl e the Streisand effect
It returned to the spotlight at the end of 2020 due to the censorship attempt by GitHub (Microsoft, therefore). Under the guise of copyright protection, Microsoft was asked to remove youtube-dl and all its Fork because they circumvented copyright laws. Initially Microsoft immediately supported the request without batting an eyelid, however this led to an incredible Streisand effect: users started reposting almost everywhere and in any way the source code by youtube-dl 2.
On November 16, 2020, GitHub finally restored the Repositories of youtube-dl and all the others Fork thanks also to the intervention of the EFF 3 who contested its removal because the software does not remove or violate commercial DRM systems but only allows public videos and audio to be archived.
This story was the main reason for us to create the article dedicated to alternatives to GitHub.
Let's go back to Seal
After this long introduction, let's finally talk about Seal! It is a simple application for Android that uses precisely yt-dlp to be able to download videos and audio from different online channels. It is really very simple to use and at the same time it is full of interesting functions and features, as well as being constantly developed and updated.
Seal It presents itself with a very simple white screen where you can enter a URL from which to download audio or video. In the default settings you can customize many options from the directory where to download to the format and quality of the videos. It is also possible to download subtitles or save only audio with different qualities.
In short, we find that Seal is probably one of the best applications where the principle and code of youtube-dl is used.
Download Seal for Android
• •This tag @loyal alternatives is used to automatically send this post to Feddit and allow anyone on the fediverse to comment on it.
- August 8, 2006[↩]
- RIAA's YouTube-DL Takedown Ticks Off Developers and GitHub's CEO[↩]
- EFF letter to GitHub on youtube-dl Takedown[↩]
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