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 — 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.