Show HN: How I know what my neighbors uploaded on YouTube | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: How I know what my neighbors uploaded on YouTube

tubenearyou.com

102 pointsthenewvu79 comments

Looks like this site is just a wrapper around the YouTube search API, which allows you to specify a location to retrieve results from.

From the documentation[0], "The location parameter, in conjunction with the locationRadius parameter, defines a circular geographic area and also restricts a search to videos that specify, in their metadata, a geographic location that falls within that area. The parameter value is a string that specifies latitude/longitude coordinates."

Looks like you can add a location to your video in the Advanced Settings panel in the video settings: http://i.imgur.com/AtnTu7F.png

As far as I can tell, location is not added by default (I tried uploading a video that has embedded location data and that location was not added to YouTube; I would have to add the location manually).

[0]: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list

how many products are "just a wrapper"? Why deride someone else's hack?

Why infer derision from a statement that needn't necessarily have been?

That something required a small amount of code or effort is valuable information. And actually, among hackers, usually positive.

The word "just" (at least with this meaning) trivializes what follows.

Yeah, after reading this again I think you're right.

> just a wrapper

Compare to "a wrapper".

Feeling like you have to do something novel or complex for it to be worthwhile can be a curse. I feel cursed often.

I regret using the word "just", sorry for seeming negative. I only meant to clarify that this doesn't expose any information that YouTube isn't purposefully providing as part of the search API. I apologize for the confusion!

It's OK dude. If people deem a comment "derisive" just because of a normal word then this whole environment is quite insane. Don't feel bad for pointing out a fact. You did the right thing! If you pay too much attention to how the whole world is reacting to your words then you'll get absolutely nothing done. There will always be negative voices no matter what. The fact that your post is on top speaks for itself.

I don't think a "wrapper" is anywhere near the meaning of a "hack". Most of the things we see posted here on HN probably involve more work and creation. Not saying that such a wrapper is not valuable, just that I think this response just intends to point out a fact. To say it's a "derision" is way too reactive. So would you rather nobody point out the fact at all and just leave it be? That would be a far worse situation IMO.

Thank you for supporting me!

Yeah, it's one of the methods that we use to gather event videos automatically: http://wesawit.com/events

your site is great, but its pretty slow on my side.

You're right. I'm trying to do something small first. I have many ideas by now, some big, they will come to life in the near future.

Good on you, it's definitely pretty neat! Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that this was simple or anything! At first I interpreted it as a security / privacy bug where you were exposing what your neighbors were uploading, so my comment was just meant to clarify that this is an intentional behavior of the YouTube API.

I'm pretty impressed by this. It certainly shows a whole bunch of stuff happening near me that I had no idea about.

So, how many videos are typically geotagged on Youtube? Most of them, or just those uploaded from phones and tablets with GPS?

Same thoughts here. Nothing really impressive in my case, but since I'm used to think that where I live is pretty boring place it's somewhat relieving to see that there's actually life happening around me.

I guess I should take a walk more often.

Thank you! Usually, travel videos are geotagged, you can search with keyword "street food", "restaurant", "trip", "travel". And that is the primary purpose of the site.

Please let me middle/right click on videos so I can open them in tabs.

+1. Another nice (and I guess pretty simple) adjustment would be to show a circle on the map, to help user see, how much "5 km" (or whatever) exactly are.

I'd far prefer some sort of interface to allow me to queue the motherfucking videos in the queue-capable viewer of my choice. VLC has some of these features, though its tendency to catch fire and halt (destroying the queue in the process) is annoying.

https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl

    1. right-click -> "Copy Link Location"
    2. middle click to paste the link into you shell
    3. run "youtube-dl" on the URL(s)
    4. watch the videos in whatever video player you want

One of these days I should make a quick firefox extension that adds a context-menu option to collapse it down to one step.

You will have to update youtube-dl every time (see the "-U" option) Google decides to change the obfuscation. Also, you may want to try the --list-extractors and --extractor-descriptions options, to see the long list of sites that are supported, which includes support for things like youtube playlists searches.

I have a cute setup for playing YouTube videos (mostly music) via SSH from my phone when I'm lying on my bed and too lazy to get up. There's a small CL script which searches YouTube based on a query, then fires up youtube-dl and dumps the raw file to a named pipe. Then, when the header and everything needed for VLC to start streaming is ready, it starts up VLC via its ncurses interface, so I can volume up/down, pause/play and seek if needed from my phone. VLC is nice enough to fire up an X11 window if you give it the right DISPLAY environment variable over SSH, so you can watch the video (even make it fullscreen via the ncurses interface). Once the video finishes playing, obviously, the named pipe and the data is gone---everything's in memory anyways.

These days I'll get to uploading it to GitHub, maybe even turn it into a Firefox extension/Android app. Though it's a little specific to my use case: I have a quality sound system attached to my desktop computer so it doesn't feel right to listen to stuff on my laptop/phone when there is such a great setup lying around. And setting up SBCL and Shelly just to run Common Lisp scripts is a little bit of an overkill.

Sorry for the off-topic, just felt like sharing this bit of my computer-aided laziness :)

That's cool! I have my TV connected to the sound system and just chromecast from my phone to TV.

Hrm, sounds interesting. How are you buffering this, if at all?

Well, everything goes through the FIFO pipe. VLC should block on reading if there is not enough data, though I haven't tested it in that case (I have a cable connection so video hiccups don't normally happen). The script buffers the first couple of kilobytes so the header is immediately available, but beyond that buffering should be handled by the kernel. Though I might be misunderstanding your question...

I tried writing to a named pipe but youtube-dl griped.

   mkfifo FIFO
   youtube-dl -o - $SOME_URL > FIFO &
   mplayer FIFO

youtube-dl quits:

youtube-dl: error: using output template conflicts with using title, video ID or auto number

Hm, this works for me. Maybe try with `-f best`? Here's a minimal working example (just figured out it doesn't even need the header buffering hack I was using so far):

    $ mkfifo FIFO
    $ youtube-dl -f best -o - 6h9vr_xwTj4 > FIFO &
    $ vlc - < FIFO

And VLC plays the video just fine. youtube-dl downloads it from YouTube as the bytes are read() by VLC, so the D/L speed is around 25KiB/s.

Though I assume you can also stream this at full speed by doing a `mktemp` and dumping the data into the file. In my experience, VLC handles files which are still being appended data just fine, but it'll freak out if it reaches EOF before the end of the stream. If your /tmp is tmpfs, which it is everywhere AFAIK, the only difference is that the video is being downloaded in full speed. Alternatively, if your downlink is fast (for instance, 4MiB/s) and you don't mind the slight delay, you can as well download the file wholly as mentioned in one of the ancestor comments.

mktemp creates a normal file and stores to disk. The FIFO avoids that, which is why I'm interested.

Actually, as I mentioned, /tmp is (AFAIK) everywhere a tmpfs mount, which means these files are kept in RAM and stored to disk only if their pages are swapped.

/tmp is typically but not always a tmpfs mount. Presumptions about where files are or aren't actually written to disk given modern virtual memory is ... somewhat fraught.

It also happens that my /tmp is physically allocated.

And named pipes really and truly work differently (though there can still be buffering).

That said, no joy (though I tracked down the issue above -- configfile setting conflicting with commandline parameters, somewhat annoyingly).

That is in fact my working solution. The disadvantage over VLC is that you've got the videos sitting on disk, sucking space, while VLC will queue and buffer videos.

Depending on what you're watching, youtube-dl can suck up a lot of space.

Mind the -F and -f options -- these list and select video quality. I find '43' for YouTube (640x360) is usually sufficient for instructional materials (lectures/presentations).

Agreed. This is so frustrating. Stop trying to reinvent the UI with ridiculous restrictions like this.

thank you, I will improve it in the next version.

Thanks!

Smallest distance you can select seems to be 5km, and I live in central London, so that's a few million people "nearby".

Editing the URL to 1km works.

5km when you live in Hollywood brings up a LOT of videos. Heh.

Yep, San Francisco is even worse as you'd expect - <1km option would be nice :)

10m, 100m should work. "Valid measurement units are m, km, ft, and mi. For example, valid parameter values include 1500m, 5km, 10000ft, and 0.75mi."

thank you, I will add more options there.

Someone living near my parents looks to have uploaded a hundred or so "chemtrail attack" videos. I honestly had no idea that people in the UK were into that sort of thing, but that's the internet I guess.

Funny, just checked near me (I'm in San Francisco), and lo & behold, chemtrails over SF, too! They're spraying everywhere!! ;)

please search with some keyword. the internet, you know.

All church services and used car sales near me, haha. So, is there any way to get the exact geotagging location, or is this obscured by Youtube?

Car dealership and "house for sale" videos for me out in the suburbs of North Texas ;)

North Jersey confirming same.

Same, just outside Phila.

please search with some keyword, the internet you know.

I'm not sure what should surprise me more. The fact that I'm somehow living at epicentre of Zumba thumpquake or that I was completely unaware of so many women my age in my 1 km radius.

Jokes aside, the sad thing is that YouTube would most likely have locations set by IP. So I'm certain the distances are off. At best this thing can tell me videos from my city. Still a neat hack.

This post is currently the only Google result for "Zumba thumpquake". No quotes, even. So I still don't know what the heck it is, but thanks for helping me achieve a Googlewhack. :D

Zumba is a dance.

So the site asks if it can use my location and I click yes. Safari asks if it can use my location which I allow. I then hit the search button and am dumped into a map of Russia. Oh well. Tried on iPhone and it gives an address in the next town over, but the map shows the pointer in the correct town. What the heck?

sorry, that's my bad. I will fix it. For now, please manually pick your favorite places on the map.

It's fun! I didn't know YouTube had this functionality.

A few comments:

- It could use a couple of smaller radius settings though (1km and 100m). Nothing that Chrome Console can't fix but not everyone is a developer.

- The intro page is a bit confusing, at first glance it might seem like an Android application, "Google Play" button being most prominent.

- The search bar is a bit short, if you just type the number and street name it's likely you'll end up in a different country or state.

Thank you so much for the feedback. I come from a C++ dev, hope you know how hard to be good at Web UI :D. But trust me, it will be better in time.

It does not work here, I have a desktop computer with no geolocation capabilities (no wifi), it just shows a white screen below the text.

It's a bug when the app can not detect your location. Please manually pick your favorite places in the map for now.

I saw the same problem, but clicking the "Search" button actually showed results.

It seems strange that it uses HTML5 Geolocation, but still drops me in Russia by default. Are others seeing the same behavior?

Before I authorized the browser to send geolocation information, it dropped me in Russia. Maybe it's the default?

I'm tethered to my phone and it showed up with my exact address, so no, it worked maybe a little too perfectly.

I'm on home broadband and it got it down to my road... does FF cache your location?

Thank you, that's a bug.

i built something similar for twitter. http://student.seas.gwu.edu/~jhaaga/YukOrYay/php/homepage.ph...

It's cool. Hope to see a better version in the future.

My wife noticed a typo:

> Specify keyword and radius to get a result near what your want.

s/your/you/

thank you so much, sorry for my bad English, I will fix it.

Well done, this was pretty neat.

Nearly all real-estate walk-throughs, but found a couple of neat things after wading through those.

Thank you so much!

Yay - nothing but car dealership videos.

Interesting that majority of vids are sales video (car, property, etc.) on many locations I tried.

I had this result as well. At first, I thought I was getting spammed but every result for the first few pages were real estate and car dealerships. As noted above, you may have to manually make the location available so that would self select gor these services.

please search with some keyword.

lol "travel the world". Don't be so grandiose. The only way to actually explore and travel the world is to set your feet out and get around, learn the language and culture. This is such nonsensical branding.

Pretty much nothing but used car ads for me.

Please search with some interesting keywords.

This is amazing.

Thank you so much for supporting me.

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