About this extension

🚀Simple lets you use a toolbar button (or context menu) to easily download videos (or audio only) from Reddit, YouTube, X, SoundCloud, TED and many more sites
Best quality video and best quality audio are merged into MKV or MP4 – there's a trade-off between the two which is explained in the popup
You can limit the maximum resolution to 1080p with a checkbox – uncheck it if you want 1440p and above ... but be aware that you're going to get the highest resolution available right up to 8K Full Ultra HD at 7680×4320 - like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2tNYfjcKfc
Audio-only downloads are saved as MP3 with best quality audio
Click the icon and choose audio or video; it's very convenient
Right-click a link to download a video (or its audio only) without visiting the link
That works even for Reddit "comments" URLs like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/88ll08/this_is_what_happens_when_one_company_owns_dozens/
Download complete YouTube playlists
It also works on a ton of other sites – try it here, for example: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/liverpool-players-celebrate-watch-video-winning-premier-league-title-epl-a9586381.html – that's a normal news website, not a video site like YouTube, but there's an embedded video there … so when you're anywhere on that page, click the 🚀Simple icon, click Download video and Bob's your uncle
Downloads from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X/Twitter will have the video ID appended to the filename – to avoid file name clashes when the name can't be retrieved
Doing most of the hard work in the background is yt-dlp
Designed to be quick and easy to use (no pasting links needed) and to succeed where some others fail

🚀Simple automatically embeds (when available):

Thumbnail
Metadata – including YouTube description
Chapters and chapter names
SponsorBlock segments as named chapters, to make it easier to skip sponsor segments, ads, intros and filler
Subtitles – press V in VLC media player to toggle subtitles on and off
Synchronised lyrics in MP3 files – for audio-only downloads, subtitles are embedded with timestamps in the ID3 tag [in the UNSYNCEDLYRICS field, for reasons] … that means that if it's a music video with lyrics as subtitles, you'll get synchronised lyrics embedded in your mp3 file that will display in most media players … and if it's spoken word, you'll have a synchronised transcript
(Auto-generated subtitles are not embedded)

First use

One-time, simple setup. You're going to be running a local Python server. You do have to install a few (open-source) things – that will work silently and invisibly in the background. Clear instructions will open in a new tab when you add 🚀Simple to Firefox.

Here's why each component is needed:

Python: Powers the server that processes download requests
yt-dlp and its dependencies like mutagen and curl_cffi: yt-dlp downloads video/audio from various websites with optimal quality – mutagen embeds synchronised subtitles in mp3 files – curl_cffi impersonates browser fingerprints to avoid CAPTCHAs and download throttling
FFmpeg: Handles video/audio conversion, merging and format manipulation
MKVToolNix: Adds chapter information and handles MKV container operations

Each tool handles a specific part of the download and processing pipeline, working together, silently and in the background, to create feature-rich video and audio downloads.

Permissions

🚀Simple needs these three permissions. Here's what they actually mean:

Access your data for sites in localhost domains

This only lets it talk to the small server script running on your own computer
localhost means "this computer" – it can't access any other computers or servers
It can't see any other websites or data

Display notifications to you

This is just for showing download started/finished messages
It only shows notifications about downloads you initiated
You can disable these in your browser settings if you want

Access browser tabs

This is needed to get the URL of the video you want to download
It only gets the URL when you click to download
It can't see any other tab information or browsing history

🚀Simple is "serverless" - it doesn't send any data anywhere except between your browser and your own computer (localhost). I couldn't track you even if I wanted to (I don't), since everything happens locally on your machine.

Love, light and peace.

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to the developers of, and everyone who has contributed to:

yt-dlp - The powerful YouTube-DL fork that powers the video and audio downloads
Python - The programming language that runs the server-side downloading component
FFmpeg - Essential multimedia framework that handles video/audio format conversion and processing
MKVToolNix - Tools that embed chapters and process Matroska container files
mutagen - Library that embeds synchronised lyrics/transcripts into MP3 files from video subtitles
curl_cffi - Browser fingerprint impersonation that helps avoid CAPTCHAs and download throttling
SponsorBlock - Provides ad segment data that gets embedded as chapters for easy skipping
subprocess - Module that executes and manages the external tools like FFmpeg and MKVToolNix
re - Pattern matching that extracts information from video pages and parses subtitles
http.server - Creates the local web server to communicate between browser and downloader
urllib.parse - Handles URL processing and parameter extraction
json - Processes settings and download metadata
os - Manages file operations and path handling
unicodedata - Normalises special characters in filenames
difflib - Performs fuzzy matching for downloaded files
shutil - Handles high-level file operations like moving completed downloads
tempfile - Creates temporary directories for download processing
socket - Manages network port allocation for the server
datetime - Formats timestamps for download completion messages
traceback - Generates clean error reports for troubleshooting
pathlib - Provides cross-platform path manipulation for download folders
random - Creates randomised delays between downloads to avoid rate limiting
platform - Detects OS type to use appropriate user agents and paths

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