Introducing reach-dl: a Local, Private Download Manager for TYO Reacheric

If you use TYO Reach, you already watch videos through your own gateway, with your own logins. Sometimes you need the file: your own uploads, a Creative Commons lecture, public-domain footage, a clip you have the rights to keep. The usual answer is a "video downloader" website or extension, and the usual price is your privacy: cloud converters see every URL you feed them, and plenty of downloader extensions phone home with more than that.

reach-dl takes the other road. It is a small open-source extension that puts a download manager in your browser's side panel, and keeps every byte of your data on your machine.

Private by architecture, not by promise

Most privacy claims are promises. reach-dl's is a design constraint: there is nothing to send your data to.

When you queue a download, the extension collects the page URL and that site's cookies, opens a local pipe to a tiny helper program on your own computer (Chrome's native messaging, with no network involved), and the helper runs yt-dlp through your Reach proxy. The helper exits when the download ends. There is no server, no message broker, no daemon, no account, no telemetry. Your cookies go browser → local pipe → yt-dlp and are written only to a temporary file that is deleted the moment the run finishes. The download queue itself never touches disk and never contains cookies at all, they are read fresh from the browser at the moment each download starts.

Because the download rides your Reach gateway with your browser's own User-Agent and cookies, sites see the same session that just played the video, which also keeps Cloudflare-protected sites happy where a bare command line often fails.

A real download manager, not just a button

Click the toolbar button on a video page (or right-click → "Save with reach-dl") and the side panel opens with the page queued:

• Queue as many as you like: downloads run one at a time (the Reach gateway is tuned for browsing, not bulk transfer) and process in order.
• Pause and resume. Pausing stops the download but keeps the partial .part file; resuming picks it up exactly where it left off. Even closing the browser mid-download loses nothing; re-add the URL and it continues from the .part file.
• Honest errors. When a download fails you see yt-dlp's actual error line and a link to the full local log, not a shrug. Most failures are just a stale yt-dlp (yt-dlp -U), and the panel says so.
• Choose where files land. A "Save to" field in the panel footer accepts any folder (~/ works); leave it empty for ~/Downloads. A typo'd folder fails loudly instead of saving somewhere surprising.
• Through Reach, or direct: your call. A "Download through TYO Reach" toggle (on by default) decides which network the download rides. Turn it off for videos that aren't geo-blocked: direct downloads skip the proxy, don't count against your Reach data allowance, and are usually faster. The choice is always explicit; reach-dl never silently switches your traffic from one network to the other.

Under the hood, "pause" is pleasingly boring: the extension simply disconnects the local pipe; the helper notices and interrupts yt-dlp the same way Ctrl-C would, which is exactly why the .part file survives. No state to sync, no protocol to keep alive.

Setup in three steps

reach-dl deliberately does not bundle yt-dlp. You install and update your own copy, and the extension drives it.

Copy # 1. install yt-dlp on your PATH (and keep it current: yt-dlp -U)
#    https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#installation

# 2. load the extension: chrome://extensions → Developer mode →
#    "Load unpacked" → the ext/ folder from the repo; copy the extension ID

# 3. register the local helper (Go required):
git clone https://github.com/e-tang/reach-dl
cd reach-dl && ./install/install-host.sh <EXTENSION_ID>

Restart the browser, switch Reach on, and the toolbar button does the rest. Everything is MIT-licensed at github.com/e-tang/reach-dl, the extension, the Go helper, and the original one-line CLI wrapper it grew out of.

The fine print, said plainly

reach-dl is for legitimate saving: your own uploads, openly licensed and public-domain material, and uses your jurisdiction's copyright law actually permits. Respect each site's terms. Downloads through Reach count against your plan's data allowance; videos are big, so proxy only what is genuinely geo-blocked and fetch the rest directly.

Next up for reach-dl: quality and format selection before you queue. If you try the extension, the repo's issues page is open.