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

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

#12

Post by zaruvi »

As a user of a Firefox-based browser, YouTube's performance really is hit or miss. Sometimes it's ok, other times it's barely useable.

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

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

#13

Post by egeozcan »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #4
phdelightful wrote: post #2

I basically have an even simpler version of something like this for my own personal use too. I found it pretty easy to write in Go and my area of expertise is decidedly not web frontend/backend. I’d recommend it as a fun little project if you’re looking for something to do. 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…

I have one too, it's honestly a very fun area to program around, and I'm not going to be surprised if this thread is full of me-toos. 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 w…

I have something similar as a simple PHP script on a shared hosting service. I can't PHP well anymore so it's probably the worst and most insecure code I've produced by a big margin. Does it do the job? Yes.

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

#14

Post by unhappy_meaning »

Interesting project and great to see other projects as well. Everyone has their own wants, wishes, and requirements for their YT feed so its awesome to see what people have come up with.

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

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

#15

Post by samstave »

Wonderful!

(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?

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

#17

Post by gdulli »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #4
phdelightful wrote: post #2

I basically have an even simpler version of something like this for my own personal use too. I found it pretty easy to write in Go and my area of expertise is decidedly not web frontend/backend. I’d recommend it as a fun little project if you’re looking for something to do. 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…

I have one too, it's honestly a very fun area to program around, and I'm not going to be surprised if this thread is full of me-toos. 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 w…

Plex is the destination for my setup, too. I have a bookmarklet I can click when I'm on any Youtube (or other video) page that sends the URL to a local Flask app that's just a wrapper for calling yt-dlp with the right args and post-processing.
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