The problem
Free video downloaders are bloated or re-encode footage, and editing usually needs a separate tool
Clipy
An open-source desktop app for downloading videos from YouTube and 1000+ other sites in their original quality, then editing them in a built-in timeline editor.
- Automation
- Live
- Tauri, Rust, TypeScript
The build
Rebuilt the app on Tauri 2 with a Rust backend that drives yt-dlp and FFmpeg, adding a CapCut-style editor in the same window
The outcome
247 GitHub stars and about 2,000 release downloads, and the Windows installer went from 202 MB on Electron to about 4 MB.
5 features. 7 tools.
- Downloads up to 4K from YouTube and 1000+ yt-dlp sites with a managed queue
- Multi-track timeline editor with trim, split, filters and text overlays
- Auto-generated word-timed captions with whisper.cpp
- Hardware-accelerated export to MP4, WebM, MKV and MOV
- First-run setup of FFmpeg and yt-dlp with checksum checks, and in-app updates
