Showing posts with label utility. Show all posts
Showing posts with label utility. Show all posts

Sunday, April 27, 2025

App Discovery: Cobalt.tools, the video downloader that just works

One of the biggest pet peeves about Youtube is it's impossible to simply transfer your video to a different channel, when you have several. You have to download your videos, then re-upload them to the other channel, then re-enter the information. 

While for channel owners there is an option to download individual videos, there is no mass download option, so you need to click on each one individually to download each file individually, and you are now at the mercy of your browser's downloader. And every once in a while, you run into a few videos that just refuse to download. You click on download, you somehow get dumped back to the content tab, or the download simply "failed" with no error given. 

Yes, there are all sorts of shady sites and apps that claims to download Youtube videos for you, many of them want money, subscription, or more. Just search for "Youtube downloader" on Google... They all look shady for one reason or another. 

Then I found https://cobalt.tools , yes, that's the whole URL. 

No registration, no payment, no subscription. 

Simply paste in the URL of the video you want downloaded, and voila, it downloads. Even the ones previous you can't download from Youtube itself as the owner of the video. 

It has other options, like get audio only of a video, or download from other platforms (not just Youtube, but all the Chinese ones, like Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, as well as the Western ones). 

It just works. 



Friday, April 18, 2025

App Discovery: PyMacroRecord -- a completely free (no trial, no freemium, FREE!) macro recorder for Win10/11

Sometimes, you need to record a macro that will just copy data across multiple windows, move the mouse, and so on. However, when you search, you find... expensive options that has an fee... or an ANNUAL fee. 

Then you keep looking, and find PyMacroRecord. Completely free, source code in Python available on GitHub. One guy's passion project made available for all to you. 

And it works. 

I need to move some videos across my different Youtube channels. However, there is no such functionality on Youtube. The ONLY option is to re-upload. 

So I quickly whipped up a macro that copies title and description from one channel to the other. The rest, like keywords and such, can be handled by re-using an existing description. I have the videos available for re-upload (and the rest, I can download in batch). 

That's a TON of manual copy/paste saved. 30+ videos means probably closer to an hour saved. 

I am sure you have your own use case when you need such functions. Don't pay when this free tool will do.