Sieve for Windows

Paste a link, get the file — then transcode it on your GPU.

A free desktop downloader and transcoder for Windows, built on yt-dlp + ffmpeg. 8 one-tap download presets over 1,800+ sites · a 52-preset transcode suite with NVENC hardware encoding · batch + watch-folder modes · VMAF quality scoring · channel subscriptions on a schedule. No ads, no accounts, no tracking.

⬇ Download the latest release

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Install

1. Grab sieve-setup-<version>.exe from the Releases page.
2. Run it — one-click, per-user install, no admin needed.
3. Windows SmartScreen may warn about an unsigned installer: choose More info → Run anyway.

The installer bundles ffmpeg, ffprobe, and yt-dlp — nothing else to install. The app keeps its yt-dlp engine fresh with a built-in self-updater (About → Update yt-dlp).

The Sieve family

• Sieve for Windows (this app) — Electron + React desktop app: hardware-encoder transcoding, watch folders, subscriptions.
• Sieve for Android — native Kotlin + Jetpack Compose app with on-device MediaCodec transcoding.

The two are siblings, not ports — same name, same philosophy (free and clean, never monetized), separate codebases with their own feature sets.

More: michaelwright.work/projects/sieve-windows

Licenses

Sieve spawns FFmpeg strictly as a separate child process (no linking). FFmpeg is GPL v3; yt-dlp is Unlicense. Full license texts and the FFmpeg source offer ship inside the app and are viewable in the About panel.

This repository hosts release downloads for Sieve for Windows.