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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

#51
post #28

A question for the author or anyone else who has experience in similar solutions. 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 of…

Check out the Vinegar extension if you use Safari. Same old YouTube but all the videos are replaced with HTML5 s.

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

#53
post #28

A question for the author or anyone else who has experience in similar solutions. 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 of…

I use a Firefox profile to watch specific videos while logged-out just for the focused recommendations.

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.

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

#55

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…

Interesting! How do you stream it to your phone? I imagine its on the local network?

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

#57
post #28

A question for the author or anyone else who has experience in similar solutions. 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 of…

I readily follow youtube links offered on HN discussions. If anything, I could use more of these.

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.

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

#58
post #46
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view Discovery as a social problem where the content you want is almost always clustered between a relatively small number of creators, regions, etc. 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 s…

There’s a lot of truth to this but one of the most powerful elements of a discovery algorithm is finding things you completely did not look for, ie Christopher Columbus and the western continents. Like your cornerstones are iOS and recipe videos but you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life.

I owe many interests in my life to the little recommendation tab next to a currently playing video on youtube

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

#59
What I've wanted for a while now is a browser extension that adds a button on youtube video pages, where you click on it and it does yt-dlp downloading but saves it to something like ipfs and posts it to some free video site for indexing.

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 " 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.

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

#60
post #28

A question for the author or anyone else who has experience in similar solutions. 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 of…

If you were to have something local build you an algorithm, what signal would you want it to consume and how far from the median would you want it to deviate? Would you want it to use signal from online socials?

This is a good idea. One signal would be HN mentions. Second might be reddit mentions, but with a lot of qualifications.

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

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