Vortex

A native GNOME application for downloading videos and music from YouTube, SoundCloud, and 1,800+ other sites — powered by yt-dlp.

Built with GTK4 + libadwaita. Feels like a first-party GNOME app.

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Features

• Paste any URL — preview title, thumbnail, and duration before downloading
• Video quality picker — Best, 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p
• Audio-only mode — extract MP3, M4A, FLAC, or Opus with quality control
• Live progress bar with speed, ETA, and cancel button
• Auto-retry with browser cookies for age-restricted and members-only content
• Persistent download history with copy-URL and clear-all
• Settings: download folder, speed limit, proxy, retry count, authentication
• FFmpeg checked at launch with friendly install instructions
• Follows system dark/light mode automatically

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Requirements

• Fedora 40+ or any GNOME 46+ Linux distribution
• Python 3.11+
• GTK4 + libadwaita
• FFmpeg
• yt-dlp

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Install via Flatpak

Download Vortex.flatpak from the Releases page, then:

flatpak install Vortex.flatpak
flatpak run org.gnome.Vortex

FFmpeg is required separately: sudo dnf install ffmpeg (Fedora) or sudo apt install ffmpeg (Ubuntu/Debian)

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Install from Source

1. Install dependencies (Fedora):

sudo dnf install python3-gobject python3-gobject-devel gtk4 libadwaita ffmpeg yt-dlp

For Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install python3-gi python3-gi-cairo gir1.2-gtk-4.0 gir1.2-adw-1 ffmpeg
pip install yt-dlp --break-system-packages

2. Clone and run:

git clone https://github.com/devkay-48/vortex.git
cd vortex/src && python3 main.py

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Install Desktop Entry (optional)

To make Vortex appear in GNOME Activities:

cp data/icons/org.gnome.Vortex.svg ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/

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Supported Sites

Vortex supports every site yt-dlp supports — YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and 1,800+ more.

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Roadmap

• Flathub submission
• Playlist support with item selection
• Multiple simultaneous downloads
• In-app yt-dlp updater
• Subtitle language picker UI
• Proper app icon

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Age-Restricted Content

Vortex automatically retries with your browser cookies when a video requires sign-in. For this to work:

1. Close Chrome completely before downloading
2. Or go to Settings → Authentication and select your browser manually

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License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE for details.

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Acknowledgements

• yt-dlp — the engine behind everything
• GNOME — HIG and libadwaita
• FFmpeg — audio/video processing