Koi 2.1 downloads videos from the notch

You want one video on your Mac. A talk to watch on a plane, a clip of your own you posted and lost, the sound from an interview. So you search “youtube downloader” and land on a page full of fake Download buttons and popups that want notifications. Or you install a whole app for a thing you do twice a month.

Koi already lives in your notch and already handles your files. So in Koi 2.1, the notch downloads videos too. Paste a link, pick what you want, done.

1. Copy a video's link from YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram, Vimeo or almost any site.
2. Hover the notch, open Tools and click Downloader.
3. Paste it in the field and press Return. Koi shows the video's picture, title and site.
4. Pick Video, No sound or Sound only, then a size: 4K, 1440p, 1080p and down, each with about how big the file will be.

It lands in your Downloads, named after the video, and in the Files Tray, so you can drag it straight into whatever's next. It keeps going with the notch folded. When it's done: Open, Show in Finder, or Another.

• Drag a link onto the notch. It says Download video. Drop it.
• On a call, say “download this video”, “just the sound” or “in 720”. Koi picks the size for you. It needs Let Koi use my Mac for me on, like anything else Koi does on your Mac.
• Open koi://download?url= with the link, from Shortcuts or a script.

The fetching is done by yt-dlp and ffmpeg, two open source tools, built into the app. Your Mac talks to the site directly. The link and the video never touch our server, and we don't keep or count either. We only count that the button was pressed. If you ask on a call, the link is part of your question, so it goes to the AI with the rest of it.

At each size Koi grabs H.264 and AAC first, because those play everywhere on a Mac. YouTube's 4K only comes as VP9 or AV1. Koi saves it as MP4 anyway, but QuickTime only plays the AV1 kind, on newer Macs. If 4K won't play, 1080p will.

• No playlists. One link, one video.
• Private videos, ones behind a sign-in, paid streams and DRM are refused, and Koi tells you so.
• A live stream has to end before you can download it.
• When a site changes how it serves video, a fix comes with Koi's next update, since the tools ship inside the app.
• No browser extension. Copy the link, or drag it to the notch.

If downloading is your whole day, a dedicated app like Downie does more. We wrote up the Downie alternatives honestly.

Your own uploads, videos the creator lets you keep, things with a license that allows it: fine. Plenty of sites' terms say no downloading, and what you download is on you, as our terms say. Koi doesn't check, host or keep any of it.

The video downloader ships in Koi 2.1, next to dictation, call recording, the teleprompter and the rest of the notch. More on the video downloader, or how to download a video on Mac step by step.