Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp
258 comments
·March 15, 2025tracerbulletx
Gigachad
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.
999900000999
> how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos
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.
dspillett
> Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.
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!)).
WD-42
Us not having the right seems a little extreme. What if I close my eyes and block my ears during evey ad? Do I not have the right to use YouTube then?
LightHugger
the advertising industry doesn't have a right to invade people's privacy on an unprecedented level, and create a massive black market for reselling people's personal information. But they do, so adblocking is, at the moment, the ethical and morally correct option.
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.
littlestymaar
> YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t.
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”).
nkmnz
> Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.
Am I still allowed to close my eyes and turn down the volume when some ad is shown?
mschoch
[dead]
jjulius
You said it yourself - it'd be nice if YouTube stopped and thought about what it could be doing differently to not drive as many people towards things like this. As I said elsewhere, the root cause isn't the people developing these frontends, it's the fact that the existing official frontend leaves users wanting something else.
phantomathkg
To do that we literally need shareholder not chasing money and pushing Alphabet pushing the Youtube team for higher and higher profit margin.
jjulius
I'd say it's less people's fault and more Google's for driving people to want something like it.
Gigachad
Yes, people prefer to get stuff for free rather than paying for it. That's not a very interesting insight.
jjulius
I think the truly uninteresting insight is the flippant assertion that people "just want to get stuff for free", rather than the numerous other reasons someone might want a different frontend, or to use yt-dlp.
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.
freehorse
There is no way to pay google to get features like these or like what yt-dlp offers. If there was I would have gladly paid.
heavyset_go
I deal with a lot of archival and forensics and tools like yt-dlp are invaluable, even outside of YouTube.
There are important use cases for these tools outside of "free stuff".
samrus
This is not correct. Look at steam, PC gamers overwhelmingly choosing paid DRM controlled games over free piracy, even for small indie games that have basically no protections
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
soraminazuki
It's not free. Regardless of what the original intention was two decades ago, Google is putting everyone under mass surveillance and their manipulative algorithmic feeds are threatening our democracy. That's an enormous cost all of us are paying right now. If people don't like that, good luck trying to avoid it. Youtube is now so pervasive that not using it effectively means not participating in society.
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?
null
Dylan16807
> prefer to get stuff for free rather than paying for it
This is how you describe a glorified VCR?
chii
netflix (initially at least), spotify and steam have all shown that it's not a money problem, but a service problem.
Good services will not get pirated.
modmodmod
so, essentially, what you are saying is that yt-dlp should have never been open-sourced/published and ever posted on HN (so that not even you would have found out about it)?
codetrotter
No no. He’s saying that only people with his exact amount of technical skill and prowess deserves yt-dlp. If you for some reason are not knowledgable about cli tools, then that is the exact, natural, universal, god given reason that you do not deserve yt-dlp.
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.
compootr
I think mister tracerbulletx has drank the stupid juice. its not a problem with developers (and products/apps the developers make), it's with google, not allowing downloads even when you pay a subscription
modmodmod
lol so poetical
mschoch
[dead]
Dylan16807
They're not talking about yt-dlp itself though.
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.
sieabahlpark
[dead]
2OEH8eoCRo0
I don't think they can ever kill it. Something else will rise. There is too much demand for it.
wingworks
Seeing how people still seem to find a way to get the raw video data from the big paid streaming services (e.g. netflix), and the likes of bluray, I feel you are right.
Where there is enough demand, people will find a way.
yimby2001
do you feel the same about ad blockers?
freehorse
Ad blockers are basically about blocking ads. Yt-dlp has also uses whose main purpose is not about blocking ads.
hsbauauvhabzb
In some reguards I would say it is. Yt-dlp terminates my need for an adblocker for the lifetime of the videos I download, something chrome no longer does on a per-view basis and these days not as easily. It also blocks the YouTube algorithm suggestions, which in my eyes are an advertisement too.
ivoputzer
it's a nice side-effect though.
null
krystofee
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.
jrm4
I mean, the root of the problem is that there is essentially only one "Youtube" that isn't a public service. Not sure if you make this better by leaning into it or not.
phantomathkg
Why should it be a public service?
jhasse
Because it's such an integral part of every day life for many people.
jrm4
Pretty much everything that's
- High fixed cost
- Low or zero marginal cost
and
- very important to a lot of people
fits the bill for a public service?
greggyb
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 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.
tmpz22
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.
siavosh
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.
tmpz22
> you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life
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.
triyambakam
I.e., that is (remember is and i)
E.g., for example (remember example and e)
Unearned5161
I owe many interests in my life to the little recommendation tab next to a currently playing video on youtube
toomuchtodo
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?
creer
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!
toomuchtodo
I believe I may have found something that is headed this way:
charcircuit
Why limit it to local? You could use the API for the YouTube recommendations. You already are using the YouTube API for the videos themselves.
toomuchtodo
Certainly, ingest all the signal you’d like, and then emit a feed for clients to consume (or to be republished). Could run locally, could run in a container, could run on an AT protocol PDS. It is an algorithm/discovery/recommendation sovereignty play.
atum47
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.
greggyb
Does this have an apparent impact on your recommendations?
siavosh
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.
bluebarbet
An even more perfect world would not have S3 buckets.
toomuchtodo
You have to store bits somewhere, and an S3 compatible target optimizes for flexibility and optionality. It can be local (Minio), it can be remote, the client does not care where it is. Even the Internet Archive's API is S3-ish.
borgdefenser
I am almost a month into having a Perplexity subscription and I am not sure I can not have a deep research subscription at this point.
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.
prophesi
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.
marxisttemp
Check out the Vinegar extension if you use Safari. Same old YouTube but all the videos are replaced with HTML5 <video>s.
BlueGh0st
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.
PaulKeeble
Can you make either a hub.docker or ghcr.io premade image so that people can just pull the image and run it and automate the updates? Its pretty standard practice in the self hosting world and if you don't do it a lot of people will not install it. People have 40-50 odd services installed, managing it via git updates just isn't going to happen.
modmodmod
Done
modmodmod
will do, thanks for the suggestion
shekhargulati
We built Videocrawl [1] to enhance the learning and watching experience using LLMs. It handles the usual tasks like clean transcript extraction, summarization, and chat-based interaction with videos. However, we go a step further by analyzing frames to extract code snippets, references, sources, and more.
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...
dockerd
How many active users do you have?
notepad0x90
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 <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.
idle_zealot
What you're describing is a piracy platform. That makes it pretty tricky to get off the ground, with regards to funding and outreach.
jasonfarnon
pirating who? I actually don't know who holds the copywrite to youtube videos. I assume the creators do, and that a lot of them would be happy to have their videos shared. It's google that wants suck the value out of the creations for themselves.
furyofantares
Well as long as you don't know who owns the copyright and/or make an assumption that they'd be cool with it, must be good to go.
notepad0x90
it's piracy when you share it with others, it can default to act as your personal cloud. It is dropbox/onedrive/gdrive except optionally searchable/shared/indexable by the public or a group of people (those legit services already allow public sharing of arbitrary data).
globular-toast
What I'd like is essentially a user-controlled caching layer for everything. When you view a webpage or video or something you are fully downloading all of that data, you might as well optimistically write it to a local cache. Then a browser extension could be made that says "save this version" which tells the caching layer to add a tag to all of the assets that were downloaded in this page view. It would create a tag that means all of those assets aren't garbage collected from your local cache and you retain your copy forever.
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.
ivanjermakov
Write a script to call yt-dlp command with url in clipboard on ipfs server
huydotnet
I built the same thing a few years back [0], and used the YouTube API for searching. It was fun on the building part.
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.
tasuki
Ahaha, I love the "vi/vim" pronouns on Christian's GitHub profile[0]. How have I never seen this before?
Thorrez
I don't see it. Has it been removed?
modmodmod
it seems that in private browsing (or generally if you're not logged in to GitHub) it doesn't show
johnisgood
Maybe mine are mg/emacs.
modmodmod
copied it from someone else, can't remember who :)
ss64
"wanted to get back my chronological feed, instead of a "algorithmically curated" one"
The 'Subscriptions' link at the top left of the Youtube home page only shows the things you subscribed to, just bookmark that.
nickthegreek
Along with so many shorts. So many. Going from Smarttube back to the official app and it just plain sucks.
freehorse
I use the "unhook" extension which let's you remove recommendations, set your youtube home page to your subscriptions (chronologically ordered videos), block shorts and more (you can cherrypick the features you want). Highly recommended. I would have paid for youtube premium if I was given these options, honestly.
nickthegreek
I have premium and that’s what hurts the most! My issue is mostly on tv connected devices.
snailmailman
They are constantly testing pushing other things into the subscription box.
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.
nosrepa
On android, you can even force the app to open up to that page (long press the icon and you can place a shortcut to subscriptions).
jv22222
This is monetizable for parents (or at least, highly needed). YouTube is terrible for child behavior as there are so many pranks and people screaming etc (in kids content) but there are a select few YouTubers who are really good for kids. For example our 10yo does well with: ZebraGamer, Half Asleep Chris, Mark Rober, Brick Experiment Channel, Ants Canada, etc. We have it locked down via safe app but it would be great to have this for the full home network with channels buttoned down.
samtheDamned
Monetizing this would put YT-DLP in danger of having legal action taken against it, or at least being shut down.
jdpedrie
What is “safe app”? Too generic to be googleable.
benkaiser
On this same topic, I just launched an app that lets you use your offline videos in an interface that is easy to use for kids.
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.
jv22222
What we find essential about safe vision is that the kid can search like normal but it's limited to the approved channels. With about 30 (highly curated) channels the kid can find a lot of safe content.
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.
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, ...)
folmar
I use h264ify plugin and didn't see performance issues for playback. The UI depends on test group you go into, but only the first load is really terrible.
nickthegreek
I never have yt issues in FF. Do you have addons that are yt related?
Havoc
There was a thing couple months back where Google was AB testing stuff that broke FF. So not everyone experienced it
Went away about a week later
nickthegreek
Just got done setting up Pinchflat this morning as I need jellyfin and sponsorblock integration but it’s always great to see a nice gui around yt-dlp with some new niche features.
modmodmod
thanks!
jfim
That's pretty great, just tried it. I'd have a few feature requests:
- 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!
modmodmod
Thanks for the feedback! Some of the new additions are already wip :)
modmodmod
tried to find a solution for your 3rd point, would love to get your feedback
jfim
That works, it makes it possible to watch the video now. :-)
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!
I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.