Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

For mine, I paste in a video or playlist URL and it downloads the video and creates a lower resolution transcoded version suitable for streaming to my phone. It also extracts an audio-only version in case that’s more appropriate.

Mine is specifically meant to help get videos onto plex in exactly the way we want - with particular emphasis on playlists, taking the numbering and putting it in plex format, and transcoding any codecs (detected via ffprobe) i know certain shitty players (smart TVs) will have issues with. Along with putting it in the right spot on the filesystem with the right permissions and user+group set so it serves correctly over samba too (for management from windows / via GUI).

It's sad that it's necessary but the internet has become so enshittified.

DRM was.. and still is dumb... as it collectively punishes paying customers. While ContentID is sometimes abused by brazen scammers, it is a better solution given the majority of content is still served off the YT platform. =3

These days I simply queue up videos in mpv. It is much lighter on the resources, and also provides a nice cache that makes seeking through videos a breeze. I can open a link straight in mpv using a very nice system[1]. Once I have an mpv instance open I simply drag links on top of it to enqueue them. (shift+drag if you haven't set the following option in your config: drag-and-drop=append)

It works so well I find myself doing it for other online sources of videos too (e.g. Twitter/X, local TV websites, ...)

[1]: https://github.com/Baldomo/open-in-mpv

This post has actually inspired me to create something of my own because I am the worst YT addict of all time.

(Also, to all the other posters who have done the same for themselves)

--

I have been mentally building a UX I want out of YT over the last few weeks. What I want to do is have it go through all my history and categorize it and give me a local page and sqlite3 of my browsing hist with various meta-data..

My YT experience has gotten so poor, that even browsing which channels I am sub'd to and finding newer vids in them is a nightmare of a dark pattern...

I thought I wouldnt be able to pull off my vision - but this gives me new hope - and I had told myself that this week I would make an attempt.

One thing I want to do is include VoidTools 'Everything' Search into some MCP tools for Cursor -- and this inspiration ties it all into a more formulated vision for what I want out of a YT ux.

I look forward to trying this out and seeing if it fills the void - or still build my own thing.

(There was an HN SHOW: that was "what if YT channels were like a TV some time ago and that always pops into my head)

--

EDIT: With the postings of GH repos and such, and my comment on categorizing and searching hist -- I also want to be able to have a dashboard of GH repos that I click on, and then have that click in hist be sent to my history categorizer automatically and give me a summary of the thing and category. maybe even from which site I found the repo -- so much like broawsing a YT hist of vids - being able to see all the repos I have been interested in.

Anyone build anything like that for themselves?

this is the very reason why I wanted to dig deeper into my-yt and trying to build a custom solution for my needs

Is there any good solution for discovering new content? Much of the time, I want to stick to my subscriptions, but I do enjoy content surfaced by the algorithm at least once weekly, sometimes more often. My concern in taking my viewing off-platform is twofold: 1) going to YouTube will prompt me with all the stuff I've already watched off platform, and 2) any changes to my viewing habits won't be reflected in algorithmic suggestions.

Am I making any bad assumptions or missing anything that would be useful?

As an example, I usually get conference presentations surfaced for me, but I don't track conferences to know when I should go looking for presentations. YouTube is good at surfacing these for me.

- pure luck. sometimes I discover a channel/creator/blog by pure accident, I'm an avid rss reader and HN adept so content comes to me naturally, so to speak.

- following a feed (be it a website's rss feed, reddit/YouTube) sometimes made me discover related feeds, simply because someone wrote about a cool project a peer made and links their YouTube/github/blog

Technically it then becomes less of an indexing everything problem and more of a find a few cornerstone creators, say Khan academy, and occasionally branching out.

So to answer your question I don’t thing the cost/benefit for automating discovery is much better then spending 20 minutes and finding enough cornerstones to fill you for 100+ hours of content. Or similarly finding a social group like an rss feed, say in ios development it would be fatbobman, and sourcing it from there.

Time to source content isn’t the bottleneck worthy of software solutions, yet for monetization reasons discovery is the vice grip of social media and made to be the most important thing.

"give me a list of the latest podcasts about/from [subject/channel] {{from the already subscribed channels}}"

--

Or a crontab of schedule "play the latest X at Y time" (so you can tell it to put on your bedtime playlist starting at 9pm)

sort of thing?

Imagine seeing Twitch, Nebula, Youtube, etc all in one aggregator app, then the switching cost of leaving one platform to another goes way down. If a content creator wanted to move from one platform to another to get a better deal, the users would hardly notice.

Unfortunately I think DRM + DMCA makes this illegal, e.g. removing DRM from a Netflix stream to use a third-party app is illegal even if there is no copyright infringement. This needs to be fixed.

Instead of just clicking the video I click share and watch on the unofficial with no ads.

I wish PLEX still had youtube plugin. Right now I have a googlesheet script that adds latest videos of channels into various playlists on my premium account. Keeps things simple bouncing between devices / chromecast.

- invidious

what else ?

Of course this still locks you into the end app for playback but the concepts are there.

For hosting, though, I picked Heroku, and they kept removing my deployment because I downloaded ytdlp on it! I ended up deploying it on my own server to make it work.

[0]: https://github.com/huytd/xaudio

  SponsorBlock Options:
    Make chapter entries for, or remove various segments (sponsor, introductions, etc.) from downloaded YouTube videos using the SponsorBlock API (https://sponsor.ajay.app)

    --sponsorblock-mark CATS                                         SponsorBlock categories to create chapters for, separated by commas. Available categories are sponsor, intro, outro,
                                                                     selfpromo, preview, filler, interaction, music_offtopic, poi_highlight, chapter, all and default (=all). You can prefix the
                                                                     category with a "-" to exclude it. See [1] for descriptions of the categories. E.g. --sponsorblock-mark all,-preview [1]
                                                                     https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/Segment_Categories
    --sponsorblock-remove CATS                                       SponsorBlock categories to be removed from the video file, separated by commas. If a category is present in both mark and
                                                                     remove, remove takes precedence. The syntax and available categories are the same as for --sponsorblock-mark except that
                                                                     "default" refers to "all,-filler" and poi_highlight, chapter are not available
    --sponsorblock-chapter-title TEMPLATE                            An output template for the title of the SponsorBlock chapters created by --sponsorblock-mark. The only available fields are
                                                                     start_time, end_time, category, categories, name, category_names. Defaults to "[SponsorBlock]: %(category_names)l"
    --no-sponsorblock                                                Disable both --sponsorblock-mark and --sponsorblock-remove
    --sponsorblock-api URL                                           SponsorBlock API location, defaults to https://sponsor.ajay.app

but the more the better, right?

[0] https://unhook.app/

I've also noticed that I getting more recommendations for small creators with little to no views/subs when I'm browsing from a smaller, developing country.

The 'Subscriptions' link at the top left of the Youtube home page only shows the things you subscribed to, just bookmark that.

But otherwise I agree with your concern. Video recommendations on youtube was far from perfect (very repetitive in my experience), but was uncovering useful stuff.

Basically, there should be a video indexing/search/discovery protocol (don't care if it's still http) where random people can submit metadata and a link to a distributed content-addressable system like ipfs. Alternatives to youtube,tiktok,etc.. even platforms like Bluesky can make use of this. Popular videos get more "seeds"/"mirrors" this way. The biggest problem is getting enough interesting content, so the browser extension helps with that, you just click "share in <insert platform name>" and you have it locally available as well as available on any of your other devices, and now others can see the content without having to use yt.

As a first step, a page showing recent youtube links from HN would be nice!

I believe this is one area where current AI could really shine.

For instance I have a large collection of links about the stuff I care or one I use as one-line answers to different questions (e.g. a friend is taking part in a hackathon and needs a color palette to display some statistical data - in my collection I exactly that along with 20 page long explanation on why these particular colors were chosen if one wish to know).

I keep them in a long markdown file I can somehow navigate by using tags, hierarchy and short descriptions but it gets clunky. Having youtube links doesn't help.

Would be nice to have a tool that would be able to get transcription, distil it to a short summary and maybe you could even ask direct questions about the contents.

[0]: https://github.com/christian-fei

Maybe it's true in other contexts, but users of such frontend likely are not paying for youtube and they're also not paying with their eyes (ads) so the DRM here is working as intended...

Also paying customers are already allowed to download youtube videos (granted they can't watch it outside of youtube but it still counters your broadband claim).

Yes, YT has good monetization, but it still pays peanuts to the average creator. So the competitive threat is very real - superstars alone wouldn't be enough to make for a really compelling platform.

Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos while western tech companies pretty much universally block it.

Sure, but it is not users that ultimately make that policy choice, and may be rescinded at any time. Thus, still seems lame...

Most streaming platforms have fragile resolution fail-back thresholds, and rightfully discourage camping on CDN host connections for 10 times longer than most of the users.

These days the amount of media data people consume in a year will be disproportionately larger than the capacity of any information appliance. i.e. not paying for the service would still mean a fortune in offline storage devices.

DRM still sucks, ask any library or historian. But I do respect your opinion, as it could seem true for some. =3

You're going to have to explain this one, how would a dance video change my life? Being exposed to something new that becomes profoundly life changing seems like a romanticized notion and not a realistic one especially within a monetized environment.

We're exposed to new stuff everyday, just because .0001% is truly impactful doesn't justify watching 100_000 short reels of ads, even if Google and Facebook REALLY want us to.

LMStudio 1234 ollama 11434

Not so sure, since everything is monetized nowadays (YouTuber make video to earn money) and the audience is there, i don't see how they could move anywhere.

Which, I get it, YouTube isn't paying them enough and they gotta eat. So, it kind of feels like YouTube letting them post their own ads is an intentional choice on YouTube's part to not give me the service I'm paying for.

Personally I don't even use it to watch the video and instead open them in browser, but it allows to monitor the channel you want and only that with a 'feed' that consist of their video in chronological order.

It doesn't require self hosting, no YouTube account, has the thing to skip promotional video and setting to automatically change clickbait thumbnail.

I call it "dadware".

In order to ensure that not too many people learn about yt-dlp, we should also work to remove all access to knowledge about the magical super big brain requiring, mytical command line.

In fact to ensure that Google does not kill yt-dlp, everyone in the world except tracerbulletx should be force fed chemical powder that makes them stupid.

That way, only tracerbulletx will understand yt-dlp, and he can heroically guard this super secret tool that only those worthy deserves to know.

What I want is it to only show me videos. Now, it also shows shorts, and also now “community posts” which are frequently just self-promotion and useless polls that drive engagement. I’ve started unsubscribing from anyone that uses those features too much. I want videos not “check out my twitch channel” and “want more merch? Check out my merch! Also this is a poll so that you will click it”

One channel I follow got some new “comments from the community” kind of feature, and suddenly posts from anyone on YouTube were showing up in my sub box because they also subscribed to the same creator. All of the posts were image posts that were blatantly rule breaking spam, or comments like “why is this a feature”. None of them were from anyone I intentionally followed. Literally just random internet comments as a huge section in my sub-box. I instantly unsubscribed.

YouTube REALLY wants to shove other content into the “subscription box” because as-is it lets you avoid all the algorithmic clickbait.

Edit: Take me, for instance. I can tolerate ads, much as I hate them - waiting 15 seconds and hitting "skip" twice isn't going to kill me. But good christ do I not like YT's UI/UX.

E.g., for example (remember example and e)

yt-dlp is itself a fork of the (very popular) youtube-dl

youtube-dl were under the microscope and were even unlisted from github at one point[0].

And as recent as 1yr ago had their website taken offline[1].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jgtzum/youtube...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/15wx4sl/youtubed...

The rate things are going I’ll just have to use those sites instead.

YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t.

A good middle ground would be for YouTube to just give uploaders an option to enable downloads.

I do agree that people need to STOP trying to make yt-dl easy to use to the point it actually competes with YouTube. YouTube Red when you factor in music is a very good deal. I’ve been subscribed for years.

Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.

Regarding the website being taken down, it was hosted in Germany and it was a German court order. Germany is notorious for this stuff, and it should never have been hosted there. If they wanted, they could have found a more reasonable host.

I understand the burnout, but it comes with the territory, and powerful enough people made it clear that the team did have their support. With some effort, the project could have continued on at full pace at least as uninhibited as its forks.

Now the URL just redirects to the yt-dlp GitHub repository, anyway.

Both YT premium and Netflix is around $100/yr, and I seriously doubt you will find 14TB consumer storage media at that cost. It is a silly behavior for sure =3

If it was packaged as a single executable electron app on the other hand, that would be another story.

it is awful that a paid subscription product like YouTube does actually aim to give their (paying) users the worst experience possible by only ever showing stuff i do NOT want to see and offering no way to disable or customize things. honestly, is there anyone happy with their offering?

but will this or anything similar ever run on FireTV / Samsung?

It's clear where this is heading:

1) Youtube will go after software like yt-dlp to ensure only AlphaGoogle-sanctioned players can play its videos

2) Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams

Both will come to pass. It's not 'if' but 'when'

They stream the commercials separately on purpose, because this makes it a whole lot easier for them to track ad impression metrics. Splicing the ad within the same feed is technically quite feasible and indeed almost trivial, it doesn't even require a re-encoding of the entire video. So we can assume that they're avoiding that for a reason.

Good services will not get pirated.

Even if they do it via some sort of chunking, then it's possible to skip chunks easily too (aka, relatively easy to bypass given the amount of effort to implement).

Not to mention it's hard to do caching this way imho.

What it means is adblocker can block the reporting API, but you still get to watch the ad and cost the streaming provider wasting money to splice the ad.

There are important use cases for these tools outside of "free stuff".

But yeah, why not also attach our payment information to our watch history to make it even more efficient for Google to keep on what it's doing right now?

This is how you describe a glorified VCR?

But if they were, they probably would agree that it never should have been posted to HN, not even the first time they saw it on HN.

Not publishing at all would obviously be incorrect. You know they're not saying that.

If a channel posts a review of a piece of hardware that was sent to them for free by the manufacturer is the entire video an ad?

You can try it out by watching a video on Videocrawl, such as the OpenAI Agent video, by following this link [2]. LLMs have the potential to significantly improve how we learn from and engage with videos.

1. https://www.videocrawl.dev/ 2. https://www.videocrawl.dev/studio?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yout...

- Make it possible to delete downloaded videos

- Show more than just a few weeks worth of videos per channel. For example, if I look at @AndrejKarpathy I only see his latest two videos.

- Have a way to view a video at a reasonable size in between the small preview and full screen

- Add a way to download a single video without subscribing to a channel

Thanks for making it a Docker image, it's super easy to get it working with Docker compose!

Literally all those services have piracy problems, and pretty much any time piracy drops it's because of more effective DRM, not service.

I think saying you don't have a right is fine... they are providing a service and dictating it's usage and you are using it.

So on the "closing your eyes". On one side, yes, allowing your browser to play the video and YT then being able to treat as a advert view means that youtube gets paid and the creator gets paid.

However... I would personally view this as can a person do this and how it works as a generalisation and I would say "no", because if everyone did this (why does just one person have the right to close their eyes), then (at least I'd imagine) the companies paying for advertising would see a drop in click-throughs and (I don't know what you call it.. but let's just say) more money. They'd then stop paying for adverts. Then no companies would want to pay for adverts and YT is no longer profitable (to YT or the creators).

Super-charging this idea with IPFS is even better. Essentially a collective Internet Archive will be created with every version of every page someone has decided they are interested in, for whatever reason.

This kind of thing would be perfectly feasible with the web as it was designed, which was designed with caching in mind.

But, of course, big corporations like Google will fight hard to stop such a thing happening because they don't want you in control. They want to be in control. They hate peer to peer technologies because they can't control them.

Went away about a week later

If you work in a part of the advertising industry with any kind of privacy invasion you deserve to lose your job and have your business be shut down, in some cases even jail time would be completely deserved. So no you don't need to allow ads for ethical reasons.

You can already do this with Sponsorblock.

> If a channel posts a review of a piece of hardware that was sent to them for free by the manufacturer is the entire video an ad?

Yes.

Do you have any evidence to support your claim?

Music purchased on iTunes used to come with DRM. There were programs to get rid of it but they got shut down by Apple and were not easily accessible. Consumers pushed back on DRM and Apple eventually got rid of it.

Rather than leading to widespread piracy, most people just started renting their music from Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

https://github.com/skhaz/qt-youtube

I see your point, bit it isn't just the ads. I object to being stalked throughout my life online, they don't have the right to do that IMO.

Separate the ads from the stalking and maybe I'll just block or otherwise avoid the stalking and not the ads, but right now that is not remotely possible. I don't use sponsorblock for instance, the main extra stuff that circumvents can't be stalky, though I do manually skip when I've heard the same scripted-by-the-advertiser-to-try-sound-natural part already (wow, so your favourite part of the service is exactly the same as the other two podcasters I've listened to this day? In exactly the same words? That really sounds like a recommendation from you personally as a genuine user… (actually, this can sometimes be a useful signal of how little trust I should put in their other opinions!)).

I have found youtube videos this month that I don't know how I would have found otherwise that were just part of the sources for what deep research came back with.

It has really created the opposite problem for me is I have so much good information I don't even know what to do with it right now. I am probably taking a month off to just sort through what I found this past month.

The more interesting point though is that at ~5 GB/hour (a decent bitrate, especially for youtube) and $15/TB, you're looking at ~$0.075/hour of video. If something isn't worth $0.08 to keep, is it worth your time to watch? This is probably a question media companies would prefer you not ask yourself.

I'll use the common excuse: I jotted this project down for myself without the thought of publishing it ^^

Am I still allowed to close my eyes and turn down the volume when some ad is shown?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/

Considering YouTubers have to disclose paid promotions, this isn’t nearly as grey as your question suggests.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/154235

People who accept that as something a company should be allowed to do are a massive problem. Because of you, they might actually do it. It will start by making sure you cannot mute the sound in any way, designing hardware in a way to enforce that - devices will start overriding the use of external speakers and play ads from internal ones to make absolutely sure you haven't muted it. Next they will force always-on cameras on us which will make sure our eyes are open and looking at the ad. Next we will have brain implants to make sure you're actually paying attention and not thinking about something else.

I find it extremely disturbing that you don't feel disgusted about even thinking of "yes".

It'll definitely trouble the non-technical set though.

Ill say again what gabe newell said. Piracy isnt a price problem, but a service issue. Its convenient, if you can make a legit way to get the product thats as convenient for the user as piracy, then they will pay for it

This is solved. Crowdsourcing. Look up sponsorblock

They seem to be the only ones who get how piracy can be fought. And its no secret either, gabe newell has that "piracy is a service issue" quote for anyone to read. Its just that these companies dont want to consider not squeezing the life out of their users for shareholder benefit

But at the same time if you have an understanding that their business model demands you accept their terms of service, so they can fund the product, your basic options are participating or not.

The vast vast majority of the time I watch YouTube it's via an official client, and if you feel so strongly about your privacy I'm sure you're knowledgeable enough to sandbox your browser. You can always spin up a VM just for YouTube and run Chrome inside of that.

I rarely download public domain videos for music projects. But this gets harder every week. Eventually I'll just have to grab my phone with an analog audio jack and manually record back into my computer.

Or just download the public domain videos from another site. Yt-dl makes this phenomenally easier, but I definitely understand YouTube's motivations in blocking it.

Something about media compression that drew our attention to quality versus efficiency:

"Typically, the production style of low quality media of the same duration creates smaller compressed video data." (Joel's corollary 6)

This was mostly because the producers increased the number of re-used video clips like stock-footage/B-roll, lower grade non-broadcast quality audio, and filming style focused on simpler tripod work with low-textured similar looking environments at fewer locations. Thus, the self-similar nature of low budget films made relatively smaller files, and were compressed into shorter track lengths on storage media.

While the budget constraints are very indicative of bad film, it does not necessarily always mean relatively smaller video files for the same media playtime indicate lame content. However, of the thousands of titles we processed at that company, it was correlated most of the time if all other factors were held the same. Now some people did like "The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black", but with perceptual compression it was a tiny track-length compared to most other films.

I'd wager streaming media ultimately has similar unconscious fiscal incentives to create lower quality content that decreases distribution costs.

Best of luck =3

If they're willing to pretend they use something and love it for ads, then I don't know if I can watch there stuff. If they just say, xyz company has paid use to advertise this, we tried it for a few days, we found it helpful, that would be fine, but don't pretend/lie that you've been using it for years.

Where there is enough demand, people will find a way.

Steam does do a great job of making stuff accessible and convenient. But plenty of people would still pirate over paying $90 for the new game if it wasn’t so hard.

It depends on the jurisdiction actually. In mine (France) and a few others, the right to save material is granted to every citizen no matter the license of the said material as long as the copy is made for private use only (it's called «droit à la copie privée» which translates to “right to private copy”).

- High fixed cost

- Low or zero marginal cost

and

- very important to a lot of people

fits the bill for a public service?

I wish we would all just stop doing this. At least fora bit.

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/strategic-policy-sector/en/...

(What a classic Canadian government URL that is.)

In theory YouTube could geo lock these features if made to implement it.

What I mean is that there's no legal reason for Youtube to prevent downloading their videos (they can't be sued by IP holders for providing a download link for that matter).

Also the videos are free either way. It's true that people are avoiding paying for an ad removing feature, but installing your own software to get features is pretty reasonable.

And ad removal is well established as a feature people use and it being fine that they do so.

While the line is fuzzy, there's definitely a line. For example, when a video cuts away from the content to talk about a sponsor that's a clear ad.

> how would you expect any company to remove in-video "ads" without rampant accusations of censorship?

Removing would be somewhat difficult. Banning would not be complicated. Companies word those kinds of agreements all the time.

> If a channel posts a review of a piece of hardware that was sent to them for free by the manufacturer is the entire video an ad?

I'd say it depends, but the answer doesn't really matter. That's a straightforward category that can be allowed or not allowed directly, no need to worry about semantics.

It seems like a good idea, Bojack Horseman is probably going to be taken down at some point, but enforcement remains elusive.

Even so, I can see how someone could have those opinions if they strongly distrust attempts at restricting hate speech. The desire for a platform that lets you say whatever you want, but not in exchange for money, is something that makes sense.

I don't think it works that way.

The only thing that had me stumped was that to add a subscription one needs to press enter, I don't recall if that was the behavior before.

Appreciate all the changes!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaiserapps...

I stuck to a one-off payment, rather than the garbage subscription models all the other parenting apps use.

It also generates an updated dashboard page from new stuff from all the creators, also essential.

The offline thing has never come up for us. They do a yearly sub $29.99, happy to pay. Just an FYI.

As for the search you mentioned, that might come into it for an older range, for my little ones they still can't read or spell yet, they just want to click on the thumbnail that looks the most engaging at any random time.

https://www.graze.social/

https://www.graze.social/blog/grazer-algorithm-engine

https://github.com/graze-social/grazer