ZV Tube

Cross-platform YouTube search/downloader/player desktop app built with Avalonia UI and .NET 8, targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Prerequisites

• Required SDK: .NET 8 SDK for building/running from source.
• Supported OS targets: Windows, Linux, macOS.
• First run requires network access to auto-download yt-dlp and FFmpeg tools.
• Optional packaging dependency: appimagetool for Linux AppImage creation.

Screenshot

Features

• Search YouTube using yt-dlp JSON output.
• Play selected video/audio with the internally managed ffplay binary (downloaded with FFmpeg), with browser fallback still available.
• Download audio (mp3) and video (mp4) through yt-dlp.
• Light/Dark theme toggle.
• Settings persisted in the user-local folder:
  • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%/ZV-Tube/settings.json
  • Linux/macOS: local application data location via .NET LocalApplicationData.
• yt-dlp binary is auto-downloaded per platform on first use and cached in the app-local tools folder.
• ffmpeg is also auto-downloaded, cached locally, and passed to yt-dlp via --ffmpeg-location (no PATH dependency).
• Localization-ready string service abstraction.

Quickstart (Run from source)

# Restore/build (optional)
dotnet build "ZV Player.csproj" -c Debug

# Run
dotnet run --project "ZV Player.csproj"

Note: The first launch may take longer while the app downloads required yt-dlp/FFmpeg tools.

Build

Linux AppImage script

bash scripts/build-appimage.sh

• Host shell: bash (Linux)
• Outputs:
  • Publish directory: artifacts/linux-x64
  • AppImage (when available): artifacts/ZV-Tube-x86_64.AppImage

Windows publish script

pwsh -File scripts/build-windows.ps1

• Host shell: pwsh (Windows)
• Outputs:
  • Publish directory: artifacts/windows-x64

Support

If you’d like to support development of ZV Tube, please use the Funding button on this repository and consider donating.