Youtube-dl
It's very nice to see a project I started reach the front page of HN.<p>I remember starting the project around 2006. Back then, I had a dial-up connection and it wasn't easy for me to watch a video I liked a second time. It took ages. There were Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that weren't working when I tried them, so I decided to start a new project in Python, using the standard urllib2. I made it command line because I thought it was a better approach for batch downloads and I had no experience writing GUI applications (and I still don't have much).<p>The first version was a pretty simple script that read the webpages and extracted the video URL from them. No objects or functions, just the straight work. I adapted the code for a few other websites and started adding some more features, giving birth to metacafe-dl and other projects.<p>The raise in popularity came in 2008, when Joe Barr (RIP) wrote an article about it for Linux.com.[1] It suddenly became much more popular and people started to request more features and support for many more sites.<p>So in 2008 the program was rewritten from scratch with support multiple video sites in mind, using a simple design (with some defects that I regret, but hey it works anyway!) that more or less survives until now. Naturally, I didn't change the name of the program. It would lose the bit of popularity it had. I should have named it something else from the start, but I didn't expect it to be so popular. One of these days we're going to be sued for trademark infringement.<p>In 2011 I stepped down as the maintainer due to lack of time, and the project is since then maintained by the amazing youtube-dl team which I always take an opportunity to thank for their great work.[2] The way I did this is simply by giving push access to my repository in Github. It's the best thing I did for the project bar none. Philipp Hagemeister[3] has been the head of the maintainers since then, but the second contributor, for example, was Filippo Valsorda[4], of Heartbleed tester[5] fame and now working for Cloudflare.<p>[1] <a href="http://archive09.linux.com/articles/114161" rel="nofollow">http://archive09.linux.com/articles/114161</a>
[2] <a href="http://rg3.name/201408141628.html" rel="nofollow">http://rg3.name/201408141628.html</a>
[3] <a href="https://github.com/phihag" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/phihag</a>
[4] <a href="https://github.com/filosottile" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/filosottile</a>
[5] <a href="https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/" rel="nofollow">https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/</a>