vdl

A fast, interactive terminal video downloader

Download videos from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Spotify from your terminal — with interactive search, quality selection, metadata preview, and real-time progress bars.

Features

• Interactive search — search YouTube by keyword and pick from results with arrow keys, no URL needed
• Quality control — choose 1080p, 720p, 480p, audio-only, or video-only per download
• Metadata preview — see title, uploader, duration, and views before committing to a download
• Real-time progress — animated spinner and byte-level progress bar for every download
• Five platforms — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter/X, and Spotify in one tool
• Sandboxed binaries — yt-dlp and ffmpeg are stored in ~/.local/share/vdl/bins and never touch your system PATH
• Zero config to start — sensible defaults, with a YAML config file for everything customisable

Installation

cargo install vdl

That's it. On first run, vdl creates a config file at ~/.config/vdl/config.yaml. The first download or update command then downloads yt-dlp and ffmpeg automatically into ~/.local/share/vdl/bins/.

On Termux, vdl auto-detects the environment, applies the certificate bundle path for HTTPS downloads, and falls back to plain progress lines instead of animated spinners. Install ffmpeg with pkg install ffmpeg before your first native Termux download so vdl can copy it into its sandbox.

Prerequisites: Rust 1.75 or newer. Install from https://rustup.rs.

Quick Start

# Download a YouTube video at 1080p
vdl yt --url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

# Search YouTube interactively — no URL needed
vdl yt --search "rust async programming"

# Audio only (saves as .mp3)
vdl yt --url <url> --audio-only

# Download from TikTok
vdl tk --url https://www.tiktok.com/@user/video/123

# Download from Twitter/X
vdl tw --url https://twitter.com/user/status/456

# Download from Instagram
vdl ig --url https://www.instagram.com/p/ABC123/

# Download audio from Spotify
vdl sp --url https://open.spotify.com/track/...

# Skip the confirmation prompt
vdl yt --url <url> --yes

Commands

Flags (yt, tk, ig, tw)

Configuration

The config file lives at ~/.config/vdl/config.yaml. Run vdl config to see the current path and contents.

# Where downloaded files are saved
download_path: ~/Downloads/vdl

# Default container format: mp4 | mkv | webm | mp3 | m4a | opus
default_format: mp4

# Default video quality: best | 1080 | 720 | 480 | 360 | worst
default_video_quality: 1080

# Per-platform quality overrides
platform_quality:
  youtube:   1080
  tiktok:    720
  instagram: 720
  twitter:   720
  spotify:   best

# Path where yt-dlp and ffmpeg are stored (sandboxed)
bins_dir: ~/.local/share/vdl/bins

# Optional Netscape cookies file for authenticated downloads
cookies_file: null

# Optional browser to import cookies from: chrome | firefox | brave | edge
cookies_from_browser: null

# Show metadata and prompt before every download
confirm_before_download: true

# Number of search results to display
search_results_count: 8

# Auto-detected on Android / Termux
termux_mode: false

# Forced on automatically when termux_mode is true
no_progress: false

For Instagram, Spotify, and login-gated YouTube videos, set either cookies_file or cookies_from_browser before downloading.

On native Termux installs, vdl downloads the Linux aarch64 yt-dlp binary directly and reuses the ffmpeg binary from your Termux environment.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 oraclevs

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. See LICENSE for details.

This project uses yt-dlp and ffmpeg, which are downloaded automatically and stored in a local sandbox directory.