Grab any video and convert anything — right from your terminal. Zero setup, and your files never leave your disk.
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.
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Install Node (from nodejs.org).
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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 — and
yt-dlp keeps itself up to date in the background, so downloads keep working
when sites change. Finished
files land in your Downloads/snaffle folder.
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, with a bitrate picker (Best / 320k / 192k / 128k)
Copied a link already? snaffle spots it in your clipboard — just press ↵. The
field tells you as you type whether it's a link it recognizes (YouTube ✓), and
downloads show the video's real title, channel and length instead of a raw URL.
Drop a video file onto the terminal and it goes straight to Convert.
Convert — browse to a file
No typing paths: a built-in file browser lets you arrow to any file (and switch
drives on Windows), press / to filter by name, and it reopens where you left
off. It only shows the media you can actually convert, then shows what the file
is (resolution, codec, length, size) and 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. Pick a finished task to open it (o) or show it in its
folder (f); cancel a running one (x) or retry a failure (r).
The terminal tab shows overall progress (in Windows Terminal, the taskbar too)
and a bell rings when everything you started is done — so you can switch away.
tab switch pane · ↑↓ move · ↵ open / pick · ← up a folder · / filter ·
esc back · ? all keys · q quit. The bar at the bottom always shows what's
available where you are.
- PDF: compress, reorder/rotate pages
- Pause / resume in the queue
- Subtitles / thumbnail options on download
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.
MIT