Vidora

$ vidora https://youtu.be/aqz-KE-bpKQ

  Big Buck Bunny 60fps 4K  ·  10:34

    #   RESOLUTION     CODEC       SIZE   FILE
    1   2160p 60fps    VP9      ~1.3 GB   .mkv
    2   1440p 60fps    VP9    ~480.8 MB   .mkv
    3   1080p 60fps    H.264  ~275.0 MB   .mp4  ← plays anywhere
    4   720p 60fps     H.264  ~172.9 MB   .mp4

   Which one? [1-4, Enter = 1] 3

   video ████████████████░░░░░░░░  67%   8.4 MB/s
   audio ████████████████████████ 100%  11.2 MB/s
  · merging video and audio (ffmpeg)

Most download sites hand you a silent file above 360p. Anything higher is delivered as two separate streams, video with no sound and sound with no picture, and they give you only the first. Vidora fetches both and merges them. That is the whole product, and it fits in a sentence. The engineering that mattered was everything around it: making a Python tool usable by someone who has never opened a terminal.

What it does

Paste a link, pick a quality up to 4K, get one ready-to-play file. MP4 or MKV, audio on its own, subtitles, or a whole playlist. It is built on yt-dlp for fetching and ffmpeg for the merge, runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and is MIT licensed. There is a command-line interface for people who like one and a local web UI for people who do not.

The terminal is the barrier

A Python tool fails a non-technical user before it runs. Install Python, then pip, then fix PATH, then find out ffmpeg is a separate thing. Every one of those steps loses people, and the ones it loses are exactly the people the tool is for. Two decisions followed. A one-click Windows installer, built with PyInstaller, bundles the interpreter, the dependencies and ffmpeg so that the first run is a double-click. And the local web UI means the interaction is a form in a browser, not flags in a shell. For that audience the install path is the product; the download logic is a detail.

Designing the command line for people

For the people who do use the terminal, the interface still has to explain itself. The format table shows resolution, codec and size, and the size includes the audio track so the number on screen is roughly what lands on disk. One row carries a marker for the highest resolution that plays anywhere, because 4K arrives as VP9 in an MKV and a good many players will not open it, while 1080p H.264 in an MP4 will play on a phone. The default is the top of the list and Enter takes it. Progress is shown for both streams and for the merge, because a silent thirty-second ffmpeg run looks like a hang and gets killed.

Why there is no hosted version

It runs on your own machine on purpose. No server holding other people’s files, no upload limits, no advertising to pay for the bandwidth, and no operating cost for me, which is the only way a free tool stays free and stays up. A hosted version would be a service to run; a local one is a file to download.

What it taught

• Packaging is a feature. For most people the installer is the first and only impression.
• Show the number that matters. File size with the audio included, not a number that is wrong by a third.
• Defaults are the interface. Enter should do the right thing.
• Decide what you will not run. Not hosting it is what keeps it free.