I built a free app to solve a production problem. Two weeks later, 64 people are using it.

I built VODForge because I work with a CTV (Connected Television) company that needed to pull YouTube videos from our channel partners into our media workflow.

Converter sites weren't giving us the quality we needed. When you're making multiple streaming versions from one source file, that matters. So I built a desktop app using yt-dlp and ffmpeg under the hood to make the process easier and keep the highest quality available from the source.

It became useful internally, so eventually I decided to release it for free, cause why not, we didn't want to pay for the high quality converter software either.

Reddit brought 25 users in 2 days and then continued trickling in. A Show HN post brought more users, people looking through the repo, and some really helpful feedback. As of yesterday, we're two weeks in at 64 users.

One person called it a lifesaver for saving karaoke videos because they had been hunting for converter sites. Completely different reason than why I built it, but the same frustration.

That has been interesting to me because there are plenty of tools that technically do the same thing. People still haven't necessarily found one that works for them. They aren't comparing every yt-dlp wrapper. They just want to get something done and move on with their life.

VODForge is free for Mac and Windows, with playlist downloads, batch url downloading, age-restricted content support, an internal player, a searchable library, and files organized by channel and playlist on your computer, just to name a few. My goal is to make that whole experience easy and maintained for you.

And it is open source:
GitHub

For people who love to download media locally, what are some of the biggest annoyances you've faced?

Here's VODForge if you want to take a look:
VODForge

Feedback on the experience is welcome too.