⚡ PyTube Downloader — Release Notes v6.3.0

🚀 Highlights

This release is a significant quality and reliability update, driven largely by community contributions (huge thanks to @ZLostTK!). The focus areas are cross-platform compatibility, performance, developer tooling, and code quality.

✨ New Features & Improvements

🌍 Cross-Platform Compatibility

• Replaced all hardcoded Windows-style backslash paths with pathlib.Path for correct behavior on Linux and macOS.
• Replaced os.startfile() (Windows-only) with a cross-platform GuiUtils.open_file() helper.
• Dynamically resolved the ffmpeg binary path at runtime instead of using a static location.
• Patched CTkScrollableFrame for consistent behavior across platforms.
• Windows-only dependencies (win11toast, hPyT) are now optional — the app runs cleanly on Linux and macOS without them.
• Auto-detects the system Downloads folder and falls back gracefully.

⚡ Performance — Event-Driven Threading

• Replaced all busy-poll while True / time.sleep() loops in manager threads with queue.Queue and threading.Event.wait().
  • Affected managers: download_manager, load_manager, video_convert_manager, theme_manager
• Threads now wake immediately when work arrives instead of polling every second, reducing unnecessary CPU usage.

📝 Structured Logging

• Removed all print() debug statements across the entire codebase.
• Replaced with a proper rotating-file logger utility (utils/logger.py).
• Makes debugging significantly easier without polluting the terminal.

🔧 CLI Entry Point

• Added a pytube-downloader script entry point via pyproject.toml.
• Install once with pip install -e ., then launch from anywhere with:

  pytube-downloader

🛠️ Developer Experience

✅ CI/CD — GitHub Actions

• Added three new GitHub Actions workflows:
  • ci.yml — Runs ruff (lint + format), mypy (type-check), and pytest on every push and PR.
  • release.yml — Automates release builds.
  • dependabot.yml — Keeps dependencies up-to-date automatically.

🧪 Unit Tests

• Added a tests/ suite with coverage for core utility modules:
  • test_date_time_utility.py
  • test_file_utility.py
  • test_json_utility.py
  • test_settings_validate_utility.py
  • test_value_convert_utility.py
• Fixed circular imports that were blocking test execution.

🪝 Pre-commit Hooks

• Added a .pre-commit-config.yaml to enforce ruff formatting and linting before every commit.

🔍 Type Safety

• Resolved all mypy type errors in utils/ following type-hint improvements.
• Cleaned up module exports and optimized formatting across widgets.

🐛 Bug Fixes

📖 Documentation

• Updated README.md with cross-platform support details, CI badge, dev tooling section, and keyboard shortcuts note.
• Added new language contributor: @sergdryg — 🇷🇺 Russian (ru)
• Added new contributor: @ZLostTK
• Added FUNDING.yml for GitHub Sponsors support.

👥 Contributors

Special thanks to everyone who made this release possible:

📦 Installation

pip install -e .
pytube-downloader

Or run directly:

python main.py

❤️ Thank you to every contributor, tester, and star-gazer. Let's keep making PyTube Downloader better — together!