I want to create a lightweight command-line application for browsing and watching YouTube videos. Ideally, it would work without requiring the user to sign in or obtain an official API key. Videos could be downloaded temporarily for playback and deleted afterward, with an option to limit download speed so streaming does not overwhelm the network while gaming or using other applications.
The main goal is to run it comfortably on older hardware where even a few extra megabytes of memory matter. Python is appealing because I have experience with it, but I am also considering C++, Rust, or another compiled language to minimize memory usage and maximize performance. How would you approach the architecture and technology choices for a project like this, and what resources or existing tools would be useful to study?
3 Answers
Start with the simplest prototype in Python. Measure its resident memory, startup time, CPU usage, and network behavior before optimizing. If the prototype is functionally useful but its memory footprint is genuinely a problem, you can move the long-running or resource-sensitive parts to Rust or C++. In practice, the biggest performance decisions will be choosing an efficient terminal UI, avoiding unnecessary buffering, throttling reads rather than busy-waiting, and relying on hardware-accelerated playback when available.
I would split the project into separate parts: a text-based interface for searching and selecting videos, a metadata/search component, a downloader, and an external media player. Let a mature video player handle decoding instead of implementing that yourself. For downloads, use a tool or library that supports segmented streams and bandwidth throttling, then remove the temporary files after playback finishes. Also be aware that accessing and downloading site content without the official interface may break the site's terms or stop working whenever its implementation changes.
For downloading and playback, the programming language is unlikely to be the bottleneck. Network speed, video decoding, and the tools used to play the video will matter far more than whether the downloader is written in Python, C++, or Rust. A Python program can launch existing command-line tools and use very little CPU while waiting on network I/O. If avoiding a language runtime is important for startup time or baseline memory, then a compiled language is reasonable, but it probably will not make downloads noticeably faster.
That makes sense. My concern is mostly the baseline memory usage on the older machine, rather than download throughput itself.