Case study
Desktop Application
YT Downloader — Desktop
Native desktop media downloader built with Rust, Tauri, and React. Supports up to 8K video, multiple audio formats, playlists, subtitles, SponsorBlock, and concurrent downloads.
The problem
Web-based media downloaders are plagued with intrusive advertisements, rate limits, quality degradation, and privacy risks from tracking user media URLs.
The solution
Built a native desktop application using Rust and Tauri v2 that manages yt-dlp and FFmpeg child processes to download up to 8K video and audio directly to local disk with per-job quality, codec, thumbnail embedding, and SponsorBlock options.
Outcome
Released a packaged Windows installer featuring automated prerequisite setup, multi-format conversion, concurrent download queueing, and SponsorBlock integration.
What I learned
Managing asynchronous child process execution for yt-dlp and FFmpeg in Rust required implementing strict process lifecycle cleanup. Implementing async IPC progress events prevented UI locking during long FFmpeg file-stitching operations.
Stack
- Rust
- Tauri
- React
- TypeScript
- yt-dlp
- FFmpeg