A living-room TV mode, ad and tracker blocking, SponsorBlock, media keys, a mini player and a real download manager, lightweight and native, built with Qt 6.

 

Install

Snap (amd64 and arm64):

sudo snap install red-app

Flatpak (x86_64 and aarch64), from Flathub:

flatpak install flathub com.ktechpit.red

AppImage (x86_64): download Red-<version>-x86_64.AppImage from the latest release, then

chmod +x Red-*-x86_64.AppImage
./Red-*-x86_64.AppImage

Downloads need ffmpeg from your distribution (sudo apt install ffmpeg, sudo dnf install ffmpeg, sudo pacman -S ffmpeg); Red tells you if it is missing.

Features

Three modes

• Desktop: the full YouTube site, signed in, themed light / dark / system.
• Music (Ctrl+M): YouTube Music in the same window, playing on while you browse, with media keys, tray and desktop media controls, and audio downloads one click away.
• TV (Ctrl+T): YouTube's smart-TV interface with keyboard, mouse and gamepad control, full screen by default.

Blocking

• Ads stripped from player and feed responses before YouTube renders them, plus a tiny network-level list for ad and analytics networks. Playback hosts are never touched.
• SponsorBlock: skip or mark eight segment categories, with progress-bar markers.
• Return YouTube Dislike, Hide Shorts.

Downloads

• Any video, playlist or channel: video, audio only (MP3 / M4A / Opus / FLAC / WAV) or the exact streams you pick, with subtitles, thumbnail, metadata and chapters embedded and sponsor segments cut out on request.
• Playlists are detected from any link; entries can be picked one by one.
• A queue with pause / resume / retry, notifications with Show in folder, and your YouTube sign-in reused for age-restricted or rate-limited videos.
• The download engine sets itself up on first use and keeps itself updated.

Desktop integration

• Media keys and desktop media controls (MPRIS), tray icon with playback controls, keeps the screen awake while playing, mini player (Ctrl+Shift+M), single instance with red <youtube-link> and red --download <link>.

Screenshots

## Building

Red is a Qt 6 (6.11), C++20, CMake application. On any distribution, against the KDE snap SDK:

sudo snap install kde-qt6-core24-sdk kf6-core24   # once
scripts/dev-build.sh --tests    # configure, build and run the tests
scripts/dev-run.sh              # launch (-- --tv for TV mode, -- --music for YouTube Music)

Or with a system Qt 6.11 or newer:

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
cmake --build build -j
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

src/core      pure logic (settings, URL rules, block list, download queue), Qt Core only, unit-tested
src/services  network and process services: engine provisioning, media probing, SponsorBlock
src/web       WebEngine profile, page and view, the request interceptor, injected scripts, the bridge
src/platform  OS backends behind interfaces (notifications, MPRIS, screen inhibit, file manager)
src/ui        QtWidgets: main window, rail, downloads panel, dialogs, tray
src/app       Application object, CLI, single instance
tests/        Qt Test suites (unit and offscreen smoke)

DOCS/ holds the feature contract, the design, the decisions and the progress log; start with DOCS/README.md. The public materials published before Red 10 are on the archive-2020 branch.

Licence

Open source: GPL-3.0-or-later for the program, with the licensing module (account, licence, evaluation and allowance code) under the Ktechpit Licensing Module License, which allows reading and building it but not changing, bypassing or redistributing it. The details, the paths and what this means for forks are in LICENSING.md.

Help

The user guide covers the window, TV mode, blocking, downloads, every setting, the shortcuts and common problems. Bugs and requests go to the issues, or by email to connect@ktechpit.com; please attach the diagnostics from About Red, Copy when reporting a problem.

_{YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC. Red is an independent client and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google.}