ExpSoft SaveVideos

ExpSoft SaveVideos is a portable Windows desktop app built by Nicolas Riquier that downloads videos from 1800+ platforms (YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch VODs, Arte, France TV, PeerTube, BiliBili, Archive.org and more) for personal offline viewing, within the legal frame of private copy (no redistribution, no DRM circumvention). It wraps the open-source yt-dlp + FFmpeg engines in a clean Windows interface, and integrates the bgutil PO Token provider so YouTube URLs are handled with the same request protocol a browser would use — no manual sign-in needed for most videos.

ExpSoft SaveVideos is distributed through ExpSoft's Patreon page. Some releases are accessible to all supporters; others may require a specific Patreon tier — see the linked Patreon post for current terms and supported releases. The underlying open-source tools (yt-dlp, FFmpeg, bgutil-pot) are themselves free; ExpSoft's value is packaging them into a polished Windows app with zero setup pain.

The download process needs the internet to fetch videos and (on first run) yt-dlp + FFmpeg + bgutil-pot into a local /bin/ folder. Once a video is downloaded, watching it back is fully offline — no telemetry, no callbacks home except an optional version check you can disable in Settings.

No. SaveVideos is a system tool, not an AI/ML app — it runs entirely on the CPU. It works on any Windows 10 or Windows 11 machine with no special hardware. There is no CUDA, no PyTorch, and no model weights.

SaveVideos is a thin, native Windows app (~1.4 MB exe) built on the open-source yt-dlp engine — the same one trusted by archivists, libraries and journalists. Compared to typical desktop or web-based alternatives in this category: no ads in the app, no per-download cap, no installer that touches the registry, and the bgutil PO Token provider is wired in so the YouTube request protocol matches what a browser sends — without the user having to log in or run a real browser.

By reproducing what a browser does. The Setup tab installs bgutil-pot — a small Rust binary, maintained by jim60105 (a Rust port of Brainicism's bgutil-ytdlp-pot-provider) — that runs YouTube's own BotGuard JavaScript and produces the same Proof-of-Origin Token a browser produces on every page load. yt-dlp then includes that token on its requests, just like Chrome, Edge or Firefox would. A PO Token is an anti-scraping signal, not a DRM mechanism, so this is protocol compatibility rather than circumvention of a technical protection measure. An optional in-app sign-in flow is available for member-only or age-restricted content.

It depends on your jurisdiction and the content. The EU private-copy exception (and its national implementations — L.122-5 CPI in France, RD 1657/2012 in Spain, § 53 UrhG in Germany) covers personal copies of works you can lawfully access. Downloading DRM-protected services (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, etc.) is illegal — SaveVideos is not designed for that. Redistribution and commercial use are not covered by SaveVideos's licence. The Welcome tab includes a multilingual Legal & Compliance section detailing this per jurisdiction (EN/FR/ES/DE).

ExpSoft SaveVideos was built by Nicolas Riquier, an independent software creator behind the ExpSoft catalogue of experimental Windows desktop tools. Nicolas's mission with ExpSoft is to take powerful open-source tools (yt-dlp here, but also pyannote.audio, OneTrainer, ACE-Step, NVIDIA's Video Effects SDK, etc.) and wrap them in clean, portable Windows apps so non-CLI users can benefit without spending hours on environment setup.