Guide & troubleshooting

Download the installer, run it, and follow the prompts. You can choose where to install. The first time you resolve a link, Youloader quietly downloads its engine (yt-dlp, ffmpeg, and a small JavaScript runtime) into its own folder, so there is nothing else to install.

Download for Windows

The installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows may show a blue “Windows protected your PC” screen. This is expected for a small open-source app, not a sign of anything wrong.

Click More info, then Run anyway. If you would rather verify the file first, the source is public and every build is produced in the open on GitHub Actions.

Youloader is built for macOS and Linux too. Grab the right build:

The macOS build is for Apple Silicon (M1 and later, every Mac since late 2020). On an older Intel Mac, build from source (below).

On macOS, the app isn’t notarized yet, so Gatekeeper will block the first launch. Right-click (or Control-click) Youloader in Applications and choose Open, then Open again. If macOS insists the app is “damaged”, clear the quarantine flag in Terminal:

xattr -cr /Applications/Youloader.app

On Linux, make the AppImage executable and run it (no install needed):

chmod +x Youloader.AppImage
./Youloader.AppImage

Prefer to build it yourself? Clone the repo and run pnpm dev, or pnpm exec electron-builder --mac / --linux. See BUILDING.md.

YouTube sometimes asks a downloader to prove it is a real, signed-in viewer. When that happens, give Youloader your browser session:

• In the app, open the cookies row and pick the browser you are signed into YouTube with. Firefox works most reliably.
• On Chrome or Edge, Windows locks and encrypts the cookie database while the browser is open, so reading cookies can fail. If it does, export a cookies.txt (any “Get cookies.txt” browser extension) and import it with Import cookies.txt instead. That route works for any browser.

Then resolve the link again. Your cookies never leave your machine.

YouTube changes its protections often. Youloader tracks the nightly build of yt-dlp and bundles a JavaScript runtime to solve YouTube’s “n challenge”, so empty or images-only results are rare. If a video still fails:

• Try again in a moment, transient YouTube errors are common.
• Add your cookies (see above), some videos need a session.
• Age- or region-restricted and members-only videos require an account that can actually watch them, via cookies.

By default downloads go to your system Downloads folder. Use the Save to row to pick a different folder; Youloader remembers your choice. Playlists are saved into a subfolder named after the playlist.

Paste a playlist link and Youloader switches to playlist mode. Pick a quality preset, then Download all. Every item is downloaded in one pass and numbered in order inside a folder named after the playlist.

Speed is set by YouTube, not the app. A few things help:

• Signing in via cookies can lift throttling on some videos.
• High-resolution video (4K/8K) downloads the video and audio separately and then merges them with ffmpeg, so the last step can take a little while, this is normal.
• If a download seems frozen at the merge step, give it a moment; merging a long 4K file is CPU-bound.

Tools built on yt-dlp are occasionally flagged by antivirus engines as a false positive, partly because the installer is unsigned and the app downloads its engine on first run. Nothing is hidden: the full source is public and the binaries are built transparently in CI. If you are unsure, build it yourself from source (see macOS & Linux above, the same works on Windows).

The download engine (yt-dlp) updates itself automatically, which is what keeps up with YouTube’s changes. To update the app itself, grab the latest installer and run it over your existing install.

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