What is vidbee?

VidBee is a desktop application for downloading videos and audio from websites. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux as a regular desktop app, and it can also run as a self-hosted web service with a browser interface. Under the hood it uses yt-dlp, an open-source tool that handles the actual downloading and supports over a thousand video platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. The desktop app presents a queue-based interface where you paste a URL, choose an output format (MP4, MKV, WebM, or the site's original format), and the download appears in a list with real-time progress. You can pause, resume, or retry individual items in the queue. The app is built with Electron, a framework that packages web technologies into a native-feeling desktop window. An RSS auto-download feature lets you subscribe to a creator's feed once, and the app will automatically detect and download new uploads in the background. This works across platforms that expose RSS feeds, including YouTube channels and TikTok accounts. For users who want to run VidBee on a server rather than a personal computer, there is a Docker-ready version. You run a container using the provided configuration, point the download folder to a storage volume, and access the interface through a web browser. A separate API server handles downloads, and the web interface connects to it. The repository is a monorepo, meaning several related applications live together: the desktop app, the web client, the API server, a browser extension, and the documentation site. The core downloading logic is extracted into a shared package used by both the desktop and web versions. The project is open source under the MIT license and credits yt-dlp and FFmpeg (a multimedia processing tool) as the underlying engines that power the downloading and format conversion.