The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

There are portable downloads of (both 32 and 64-bit) Tartube, so I reckon it deserves a quick post.

Tartube is a GUI front-end for youtube-dl, yt-dlp and other compatible video downloaders. It is partly based on youtube-dl-gui and is written in Python3/Gtk3. Tartube runs on MS Windows, Linux, BSD and MacOS.

Apparently, portability is achieved with a batch file with this somewhat cryptic content:
Download Tartube latest release (currently v2.3.110, dated 2021-02-28) at https://tartube.sourceforge.io/#downloads.

Following up my quick test with Videomass, I suspect Tartube also falls in the "no-install" genre so, until further contrary evidence, I'll move the topic to "Not Portable" as well.

The portable edition of Tartube is 100% portable. (Source: I wrote it.)

You can easily test this for yourself: download the zip and extract it. If you like, execute the .BAT file and follow the on-screen prompts to install youtube-dl and FFmpeg.

Then you can copy the extracted folder anywhere you like. The config file, youtube-dl, FFmpeg, aria2c and atomicparsley are all instide that folder, so settings will remain the same and you don't need to reinstall anything, not even on a separate computer.

Hi axcore, welcome to TPFC forums and thank you for clearing that.

I couldn't fully test Tartube as when I tried to do so, it proceeded to download in excess of 2GB of files before I had to forcefully kill it for fear of running out of storage space in the drive I was setting it up.

Can anyone else please confirm this before I move the topic back to "Submissions"?

>I couldn't fully test Tartube as when I tried to do so, it proceeded to download in excess of 2GB of files before I had to forcefully kill it for fear of running out of storage space in the drive I was setting it up.

You can thank FFmpeg for that. I don't know why the FFmpeg download requires so many dependencies, but we are stuck with it.

For testing purposes, you don't need to download FFmpeg at all. Tartube will run and most videos can be downloaded (though not necessarily at the highest resolutions.)

axcore wrote:You can thank FFmpeg for that. I don't know why the FFmpeg download requires so many dependencies, but we are stuck with it.

FWIW, Windows FFmpeg builds are very far from those storage costs -- e.g., see how https://github.com/AnimMouse/ffmpeg-autobuild/releases amount to around 100MB and yet it's one of the largest builds, due to statically integrating non-free libfdk_aac... (viewtopic.php?t=16912 for other Windows builds).

I always have FFmpeg on my systems BTW, so the issue could probably be easily solved by providing a way to point to local executables (and please allow for relative paths for true portability).

Having said that, the main reason Tartube sparked my interest was for its integration of FFmpeg.

Tartube is running under MSYS2, and therefore so is youtube-dl, aria2c, atomicparsley and FFmpeg. The size discrepancy can be explained by the fact that Tartube is downloading a FFmpeg build for Linux, along with all of its dependencies, rather than the normal Windows build. (I have never been able to get that working, and no-one has shown any interest in assisting me.)

Anyway, when I do the next release, I will add a version that has FFmpeg pre-installed. I don't know if that will drastically reduce the total download or not, but we'll see.