I Open-Sourced VidBee, a Video Downloader for Thousands of Sites

Nexmoe November 2, 2025
This article is an AI translation and may contain semantic inaccuracies.

Recently I got the urge to find a desktop tool for downloading videos. After trying a bunch of options, the UI was either painfully outdated or the features were a mess—and the pure CLI tools were just too uncomfortable to use.

So I built my own. The project is called: VidBee.

Project home:

👉 https://vidbee.org

If this tool helps you, please give it a star 👉 https://github.com/nexmoe/VidBee

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VidBee is an open-source video downloader built with Electron + React + TypeScript. It uses yt-dlp under the hood (you know the legendary one), so it can download videos from 1000+ sites. The key point though—finally, a clean UI that’s easy on the eyes and satisfying to click.

Key Features

  • Desktop app for Windows / macOS / Linux
  • Paste a link and download; supports multi-task queue, pause, and retry
  • Choose format and quality, or download audio only
  • Follows system theme, with both light / dark modes
  • Runs fully locally: no uploads, no cloud

Download & Install

1. Get the latest version

Visit https://vidbee.org/download/ to download the latest version:

  • Windows: vidbee-x.x.x-setup.exe
  • macOS: vidbee-x.x.x.dmg
  • Linux: vidbee-x.x.x.AppImage

2. Install and run

After downloading, just install it. Windows and Linux users can double-click the installer. macOS users drag it into the Applications folder.

3. Note for macOS users

If you see “App is damaged” on macOS, run this in Terminal:

xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine /Applications/VidBee.app/

This is macOS security behavior—third-party apps you download need to be manually unquarantined.

Why I made this

I simply wanted a clean, local video downloader—no command line, no ads. And Electron performance isn’t as bad as people think; with Vite builds, it starts pretty fast.

I put a lot of effort into UX and studied many commercial products. The goal was a tool that’s fully capable but also intuitive and genuinely pleasant to use.

I’ll gradually add more features, such as:

  • Download subtitles / danmaku
  • Batch downloads for playlists
  • Download history / task records
  • Custom themes

The project is MIT-licensed and fully open source. If you’re interested in contributing code or UI design, you’re welcome to jump in. It gets a little lonely building alone 😂

👉 https://github.com/nexmoe/VidBee