Sloth Archiver

SlothArchiver is a free, open-source desktop app for downloading and actually keeping your favorite videos, not just dumping files into a folder and forgetting about them.

I built it because I got tired of watching my old YouTube playlists quietly rot. Videos get deleted, privated, or hidden with zero explanation, and you're left with an "X videos hidden" label and no idea what you lost. SlothArchiver exists so that doesn't happen to you.

Under the hood it's powered by yt-dlp and ffmpeg, but on top of that it gives you an actual library: searchable, sortable, with real metadata, not just a pile of mp4 files. A few things it does that most downloader tools don't bother with:

• A persistent local library with search, filtering, and an embedded player, for both the source video and your local copy
• Playlist tracking that keeps syncing over time and tells you when videos get removed, instead of just silently dropping them
• Version history per video ("epochs"), so if you re-download something at a different quality or a video gets edited down, you can keep both
• Built in clipping, MP3 extraction, and format conversion, all through ffmpeg, no separate tools needed
• Everything lives as plain files on your filesystem. No database lock in, no Docker, no server. Move your library to a new machine and it just works. Uninstall the app and your files are still yours

It's licensed under GPLv3. There are already tools out there that do parts of this and then paywall the good stuff behind a subscription. I didn't want that to ever happen here, even if the project grows.