config.json and cache.db (if present).⚠️ Note: This will reset your custom settings, output folder, and theme preferences.
Sometimes the "unhandled error" is caused by OVD not having permission to write files to the download folder.
First, a quick refresher. Open Video Downloader (sometimes packaged as Video Downloader or OpenVideoDownloader) is a popular open-source graphical interface for yt-dlp (a more active fork of youtube-dl). It allows users to paste a video URL from YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook, and hundreds of other sites, then download it in various qualities and formats. open video downloader error unhandled error execa top
Under the hood, Open Video Downloader doesn’t do the actual downloading. It calls a command-line tool (usually yt-dlp.exe on Windows or yt-dlp on Mac/Linux) and captures its output. The "execa" part is a Node.js library (execa) that runs external commands. The "top" refers to the top command in Unix-like systems – or a misinterpreted argument.
In short: The error means Open Video Downloader tried to run a system or helper command (like top or a process listing) and failed. This usually points to a missing dependency, a broken PATH environment variable, or a conflict with security software. Delete or rename config
A prevalent cause of execa errors in older versions of Open Video Downloader involves the handling of file paths containing spaces.
If the internal configuration files are corrupted: ⚠️ Note: This will reset your custom settings,
To understand the error, one must understand the stack:
When a user clicks "Download," Open Video Downloader constructs a command string (e.g., yt-dlp -f best...). It passes this string to execa. execa attempts to spawn a new process. If this process fails to start, crashes immediately, or returns a non-zero exit code without proper error handling, the execa promise rejects. If the application code does not have a .catch() block attached to that promise, it results in an "Unhandled Error."