Spyder

video downloader tool that supports

video downloader tool that supports YouTube.

Paste a link → it works out where the link is from and reads it → pick a quality → pick a folder → Download.

Licensed under GPL-3.0.

What it does

• Paste a video URL and fetch the qualities that link actually offers
• Recognises the site as you paste — the name appears in the URL bar immediately, and the link is read without you pressing anything
• TikTok downloads have no watermark, at the highest quality the post has
• Simple quality presets: Best available, per-resolution (1080p, 720p, …), and Audio only (MP3)
• Native folder picker, remembers the last folder you used
• Live progress bar with size, speed and ETA
• Status/log panel showing each stage (reading link, downloading, merging with ffmpeg, done)
• Cancel button that stops cleanly and deletes the half-written files
• Friendly messages for bad links, dead videos, network drops and missing ffmpeg

Deliberately not in v1: playlists, subtitles, trimming.

Platforms

Anything yt-dlp supports will download. What changes per site is how Spyder presents it.

The moment a link lands in the URL bar its site is named there — no network call, it is a hostname lookup — and half a second later Spyder reads the link by itself. The Fetch button still works; it just rarely needs pressing.

TikTok is the one site with its own rules:

• TikTok serves every video twice, once clean and once stamped with a drifting @handle. Spyder filters the stamped copies out entirely, so the watermark-free version is not a setting to find — it is the only thing offered.
• The top preset reads Best quality, no watermark and is already selected.
• Because TikTok publishes each quality as one finished file, Spyder takes it whole instead of downloading video and audio separately and merging them.
• vm.tiktok.com and vt.tiktok.com short links work; they are resolved on the way through.

Vertical video is named the way people name it. A 1080×1920 TikTok or Short is listed as 1080p, not 1920p.

TikTok needs one extra piece

TikTok turns away any client that does not look like a real browser, so yt-dlp has to impersonate one. That ability comes from curl_cffi, which requirements.txt pulls in via yt-dlp's curl-cffi extra and which is bundled inside the built exe. Without it TikTok fails before it starts; Spyder notices a TikTok link it cannot read and says so in the log rather than letting the fetch fail unexplained.

Using the built app

Grab Spyder.exe and double-click it. Python, Qt, yt-dlp and ffmpeg are all bundled inside, so there is nothing else to install.

The exe is unsigned, so Windows shows a "Windows protected your PC" screen the first time. Click More info -> Run anyway. First launch takes a few seconds while it unpacks.

Running from source

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python run_spyder.py

From source, ffmpeg is not bundled. Spyder looks for it in this order:

1. Inside the bundle (frozen builds only)
2. Next to Spyder.exe, or in the project root / vendor/ when run from source
3. Anywhere on your PATH

So either drop an ffmpeg.exe into vendor/ (running python build.py once fetches it for you), or install ffmpeg system-wide:

winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

Without ffmpeg the app still starts and warns you in the log; downloads that need merging or MP3 conversion will fail with a clear message.

Building the .exe

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
python build.py

build.py downloads a static ffmpeg (~30 MB zipped, once) into vendor/, then runs PyInstaller. The result is a single self-contained file:

dist\Spyder.exe

Roughly 80 MB, because it contains Python, PyQt6, yt-dlp and ffmpeg.

Options:

Flag	Effect
--clean	delete build/ and dist/ first
--no-ffmpeg	skip the ffmpeg download; produces a much smaller exe that needs ffmpeg on the user's machine

To run PyInstaller directly instead:

pyinstaller Spyder.spec --noconfirm

The spec bundles vendor/ffmpeg.exe if it is present and warns if it is not.

Notes on the build

• The exe is windowed (console=False). spyder/main.py patches subprocess.Popen with CREATE_NO_WINDOW so ffmpeg does not flash a console.
• yt_dlp.extractor.lazy_extractors is listed as a hidden import — yt-dlp loads extractors dynamically and PyInstaller cannot see them.
• curl_cffi needs the same treatment and then some. PyInstaller ships no hook for it, so the spec collects its submodules by hand and copies the libcurl-impersonate-*.dll out of the curl_cffi.libs directory the wheel puts beside the package. That directory name matters: curl_cffi/__init__.py passes it to os.add_dll_directory before loading its extension, so the DLL has to keep it rather than land at the bundle root like everything else. Building without curl_cffi installed prints a warning and produces an exe that cannot read TikTok.
• The pixel-art icon comes from logo.ico, with dedicated 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128 and 256px images for the exe, window and taskbar. logo.png is the large preview and logo.aseprite is the editable source. Replace both logo.ico and logo.png and rebuild to change it. Without logo.ico, the build generates icon sizes from logo.png instead.
• Unused Qt modules (QML, Quick, WebEngine, Multimedia, …) are excluded to keep the exe smaller.
• Some antivirus tools flag unsigned PyInstaller one-file exes. Code-signing is the real fix; a --onedir build (drop runtime_tmpdir, use COLLECT) trips it less often.

Releasing

1. python build.py --clean
2. Check dist/ contains Spyder.exe and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt
3. Tag and push: git tag v1.0.0 && git push origin v1.0.0
4. Create the GitHub release and attach both files from dist/

Attaching the notices file matters — it is what keeps the GPL ffmpeg binary inside the exe properly licensed. Bump __version__ in spyder/__init__.py when you cut a new version.

Tell people the first launch shows a SmartScreen warning (the exe is unsigned): More info -> Run anyway. Signing is the only real fix.

License

Spyder is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 - see LICENSE.

It has to be. Spyder links PyQt6, which is GPLv3, so any distributed build must also be GPLv3 and ship its source. Publishing this repository satisfies that.

To relicense Spyder under something permissive you would need to drop PyQt6 - porting ui.py and worker.py to PySide6 (LGPLv3) is mostly import renames, since neither uses PyQt-specific APIs - or buy a Riverbank commercial PyQt licence.

Bundled components

THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt ships inside the exe and next to it. It covers:

Component	License
FFmpeg (gyan.dev essentials build)	GPLv3+
PyQt6 / Qt6	GPLv3 / LGPLv3
yt-dlp	The Unlicense
curl_cffi + libcurl-impersonate	MIT (bundles libcurl, BoringSSL, nghttp2)
Python	PSF License v2

FFmpeg is run as a separate process, so only its own binary is covered by its license.

A note on use

Spyder is a front-end for yt-dlp; it does not host, bypass, or decrypt anything. Downloading may still breach a site's terms of service or copyright law depending on the content and your country. That is on the person using it.

Removing a watermark does not remove the credit it stood for. A TikTok saved through Spyder is still someone's work, and reposting it as your own is the thing the watermark existed to prevent.

Project layout

run_spyder.py        launcher / PyInstaller entry point
spyder/
  main.py            app bootstrap, Windows console suppression
  ui.py              MainWindow — widgets and signal wiring only
  theme.py           palette, the three type roles, the global stylesheet
  widgets.py         the blocky pieces Qt does not provide
  worker.py          QThread wrappers: ProbeWorker, DownloadWorker
  downloader.py      yt-dlp logic (Qt-free), presets, error translation
  platforms.py       which site a link is from, and what that changes
  icons.py           the line-art icon set, drawn with QPainter
  win32.py           what a frameless window owes Windows
  ffmpeg_tools.py    finding ffmpeg
  resources.py       finding bundled assets (icons)
logo.png             large source logo / preview
logo.ico             authored Windows icon sizes
logo.aseprite        editable pixel-art source
assets/              generated Spyder.ico + icon.png (gitignored)
Spyder.spec          PyInstaller spec
build.py             fetch ffmpeg + build in one command
vendor/              ffmpeg.exe lands here (gitignored)

The look

The design language is kitty's, ported to Qt: neutral dark, rounded, and drawn entirely by the app.

Nothing on screen is drawn by the OS. Spyder has no title bar, because an OS frame above a carefully made app looks like a web page in a picture frame. A strip flush to the top carries the mark, what is downloading, and the three window controls; everything else sits in one rounded canvas inset from the edges, on a 4px dot texture.

Dropping the frame means owing the user everything it gave them, and that debt is paid rather than ignored:

What the frame did	Who does it now
Drag to move, with Aero Snap	TitleBar, via startSystemMove
Double-click to maximise	TitleBar.doubleClicked
Edge and corner resize	EdgeResizer, via startSystemResize
Keeping a maximised window off the taskbar	win32.clamp_maximised
Rounded outer corners	win32.round_corners

No blue in the greys. A tint that reads as merely "cool" on one panel becomes a colour cast across a window full of them, so the neutrals are true neutrals and the only hue is the accent (#2b948b), spent on state: a focused field, the chosen row, the primary button, the recognised platform.

Four radii, not a value per element. Every rounded thing picks one of R_XS/R_SM/R_MD/R_LG, so two controls of the same weight cannot disagree about how round they are.

Three consequences show up in the code. Every colour and font decision lives in theme.py as one style sheet, so no widget carries its own styling. Because the style allows no floating system windows, widgets.py reimplements the two things Qt would otherwise float: the quality dropdown (BlockSelect, a menu built from our own rows) and message boxes (BlockDialog, a panel washed over the page). The folder picker stays native — that one is the OS's job.

Icons are drawn, not fetched. icons.py strokes each one on its own square viewbox, the way kitty draws its SVGs, so they are identical on every machine and take the app's line weight. The icon fonts this replaced — Segoe Fluent on Windows 11, Segoe MDL2 on 10, neither anywhere else — needed a text fallback for a case that could not be tested.

Type is Segoe UI Variable Text for the interface and Cascadia Mono for everything technical: links, paths, sizes, speeds and the log.

Why the modules split this way

downloader.py knows nothing about Qt and ui.py never blocks. Every slow call — reading a link, downloading — happens on a QThread and reports back through signals, so the window stays responsive.

platforms.py is the same idea applied to per-site behaviour. Rather than scattering if tiktok: through the downloader and the window, each site is one frozen Platform record carrying what it changes — the wording of the top preset, whether watermarked formats are dropped, whether to prefer one finished file over a merge. The two modules that care read those fields; adding a site is an entry in a table. It is Qt-free and network-free, which is what lets the window name a link on every keystroke without lagging.