I tried to install it but I couldn't install WxPython3 via SourceForge so I couldn't get the deps to work. Plus the maintainer of that app doesn't care much for supporting OS X and Linux (basically tells people to just go use Windows) so I wanted to use Electron where I can package an app for all platforms.

I'm a bit ignorant of the details b/c I haven't touched web stuff before. But on a high level, how does a Javascript/Electron app wrap-around/bundle-with youtube-dl - which (looking at github) is a python app?

Or does youtube-dl need to be already be pre-installed on the system?

Electron is a small Chromium browser that can interact with Node.JS, youtube-dl is packaged with this app as a node package manager dependency. The youtube-dl binary is downloaded and then called via a child process, let me know if that clears things up for you.

So you need to have the python runtime installed for this to work? Or is that downloaded as well?

I was just thinking I could for instance make a similar JavaFX crossplatform GUI on the JVM, but I'd have no idea how to call the youtube-dl python code. So I'm just curious how Electron solves that problem :)

No you just need the prereqs to run node, the binary comes compiled already

Oh okay with precompuled binaries then that's not so crossplatform. Thanks for clarifying :)

Yep seems like dlg also has config options (flags passed to youtube-dl) unlike this app.

As a sidenote I didn't know what you were referring to initially because the executable is named youtube-dl-gui...

Not to mention youtube-dlg has a nicer, more powerful UI.

I hadn't heard of youtube-dlg. I tried to install it and it looks like it's still Python2 :(