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

Agreed. Youtube downloaders are essential for backup purposes and for getting clips to put in your own videos as fair use. But people turning them in to fully user facing ad free frontends are driving the crackdown on the tools so we will end up with no way at all to download videos..

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.

If they shut down yt-dlp for good, a lot of power users and creators would find the YouTube platform useless for themselves and abandon it en masse for its nearest competitor. A tool like yt-dlp is very much required if you want to engage professionally with that kind of community. Even something as trivial as making a well-produced "video reaction" relies on it.

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.

My take is: its either there with all of its features and popularity or its not. The argument that it will be taken down if its more popular seems to me fundamenally wrong.

I'd say it's less people's fault and more Google's for driving people to want something like it.

I don't think they can ever kill it. Something else will rise. There is too much demand for it.

do you feel the same about ad blockers?

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?

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 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.

I've been using Unhook[0] for years that it's almost a jumpscare for me to see a recommended video or the Youtube homepage. Your social circles and natural serendipity should be plenty for finding new creators. And in general, avoiding algorithmic feeds will help with ADHD and mindless scrolling.

[0] https://unhook.app/

I've been using a third party app to watch the videos and the official app to discover content.

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

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.

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.

I looked into this as well since I find the YouTube algorithm terrible, but couldn’t find any API for exploration. Which makes sense they want to control what you watch and hence monetize. In a perfect world you could just pick an open source recommendation algorithm from a marketplace and YouTube would just be a wrapper around s3 buckets and some index.

good question. I don't think I have a definitive answer but I'll try:

- 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

copied it from someone else, can't remember who :)

Along with so many shorts. So many. Going from Smarttube back to the official app and it just plain sucks.

Done

will do, thanks for the suggestion

Monetizing this would put YT-DLP in danger of having legal action taken against it, or at least being shut down.

What is “safe app”? Too generic to be googleable.

Write a script to call yt-dlp command with url in clipboard on ipfs server

What you're describing is a piracy platform. That makes it pretty tricky to get off the ground, with regards to funding and outreach.

thanks!

Just recently I stumbled upon these options of yt-dlp, but haven't had the chance to dig deeper (sorry in advance for the formatting):

  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

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 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).

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

the project currently supports cookies (never use your own though, of your google profile), just place them in cookies.txt in the root of the project. but it didn't seem to work well on my server, on a residential IP it works well