Marc's Social Loader
Marc's Social Loader
Small to operate, serious in what it can do.
Paste a URL — the app fetches thumbnail, title, duration and the available quality levels in the background. No click needed.
H.264 / AAC are preferred — directly compatible with Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder. No re-encoding after the download.
Up to three videos at once, with combined progress in the Dock icon.
A macOS notification with a “Show in Finder” action for every finished download.
Editable before the download — no cryptic platform IDs in your edit project.
Three appearance modes with a dynamic app icon that follows the system setting.
Full localisation with automatic detection of the system language.
Updates install themselves in the background after the first launch. No manual downloading, no Homebrew.
Four main platforms plus everything yt-dlp supports under the hood.
Three clicks from link to file.
Copy the URL from the browser, paste it into the app — thumbnail, title and duration appear automatically.
H.264/AAC for direct import into Premiere or Final Cut, or the highest available resolution. Adjustable for each video.
Finished in the folder you chose, with a native notification and “Show in Finder” straight from Notification Center.
Everything you need is in the bundle.
Get the current version from the GitHub releases page (.zip).
Drag Marc's Social Loader.app into the Applications folder.
The first time, right-click the app and choose “Open” — the standard procedure for unsigned macOS apps. Later updates install silently via Sparkle.
What people often ask at first launch.
Because the app is not distributed through the App Store and I have not signed it with the Apple Developer Program. At first launch: right-click the app → “Open” → confirm. After that it runs like any other app, and updates arrive silently via Sparkle.
H.264/AAC by default, because that imports directly into Premiere, Final Cut, Resolve and Adobe Media Encoder — no re-encoding needed. If you want higher quality, you can choose the highest available resolution for each video.
Tested directly: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X. yt-dlp runs in the background and knows more than 1,000 further sources — Vimeo, Dailymotion, SoundCloud, Twitch, Reddit videos and many more usually work as well.
The tool itself is legal — it uses open standards and open-source components. What you do with the downloaded videos is your responsibility: copyright and the platforms' terms of use still apply. Personal backups, educational and research purposes are largely covered in Germany; commercial reuse without a licence is not.
No. The app runs entirely locally and sends no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reports. Update checks only go to the Sparkle update feed URL on GitHub.
yt-dlp usually downloads TikTok videos without a visible watermark. When a platform changes something this can occasionally break — updates then follow promptly through the built-in update mechanism.
Not at the moment. The app is built natively in Swift and uses macOS-specific APIs (notifications, Dock tile, Sparkle). If you want the same on Windows or Linux, you can use yt-dlp + ffmpeg directly in the terminal — the logic behind it is exactly the same.
Born from a concrete need.
In my day-to-day marketing and design work I regularly deal with social media videos — as reference, for re-edits, for briefings. yt-dlp and ffmpeg are the best tools there are for this, but they run in the terminal. Instead of explaining the tooling to the team for every project, I packed the most important functions into a native Mac app: paste the URL, choose the quality, done.
The code is open — build it yourself if you like.
The first build downloads and caches the dependencies (~117 MB: yt-dlp, ffmpeg, Sparkle). Licence: GNU GPL v3. Bundled: yt-dlp (The Unlicense), ffmpeg (LGPL/GPL), Sparkle (MIT).