Grabbing a video off the web usually means a sketchy site full of fake buttons, watermarks and size limits — and uploading your private file to a stranger's server. Converting one is the same story. snaffle does both in your terminal instead: paste a link and it grabs the video, browse to a file and it converts it. Everything happens on your machine; nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Get started

1. Install Node (from nodejs.org).

2. Run it:

   npx snaffle

That's it. The yt-dlp and ffmpeg binaries snaffle needs are fetched automatically the first time, so there's nothing to install by hand. Finished files land in your Downloads/snaffle folder.

What it does

Grab — paste a link Works with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, and 1000+ more (anything yt-dlp supports). Pick your output right on the screen:

• Video · MP4 — best video + audio, merged, with a quality picker (Best / 1080p / 720p / 480p)
• Audio · MP3 — just the sound, extracted to MP3

Convert — browse to a file No typing paths: a built-in file browser lets you arrow to any file (and switch drives on Windows). It only shows the media you can actually convert, then offers the formats that make sense:

| Input | Convert to | | --- | --- | | Video | MP4 · smaller/compressed MP4 · MP3 · M4A · Trim | | Audio | MP3 · M4A · WAV · Trim |

Trim cuts a section out of any clip — pick the file, choose Trim, and type a start and end time (e.g. 0:05 1:30). Fast and lossless (it keeps the original format).

PDF — quick tools, all offline Three keyboard-driven tools (powered by pure-JS pdf-lib, no extra binaries):

• Images → PDF — multi-select JPG/PNG (numbered in the order you pick them) into one PDF
• Merge PDFs — combine several PDFs into one
• Split / extract — pull pages out of a PDF with a simple spec like 1-3,5

Queue Downloads, conversions and PDF jobs run together with live progress, speed and ETA, newest first.

Keys

tab switch pane · ↑↓ move · ↵ open / pick · ← up a folder · esc back · q quit. The bar at the bottom always shows what's available where you are.

Roadmap

• PDF: compress, reorder/rotate pages
• Pause / resume / cancel in the queue
• Subtitles / thumbnail options on download

A note on usage

snaffle is a thin, friendly front-end over the open-source yt-dlp and ffmpeg. Downloading from a platform may be subject to its terms of service and to copyright. Use it for content you have the right to save — your own uploads, Creative Commons and public-domain works, or media you're allowed to keep for offline viewing. Respecting those rules is on you.

License

MIT