Comment by iKlsR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iKlsR | Hacker News Reader

I've been playing with the idea and have a prototype of a "Youtube Manager" for lack of not having a better name app powered by electron. I have some 300+ subscriptions (yeah I know... but these are curated very interesting channels that upload often) and yt's interface is horrible to keep track of uploads/subscriptions. I don't care for spamming my inbox when someone uploads or push notifications and I tend to miss uploads I look forward to at times.

It has several layouts, my most used being a trello/tweetdeck setup with categories and fullscreen/overlayed video, also spent last weekend adding the mobile minimize video feature while able to search. It's been a sideproject for several months now and I find it highly useful but I was wondering if I should take the plunge and develop this into something more. I'm a bit hesitant seeing how youtube killed Streamus (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/07/21/how-youtube-killed-...). But since this has popped up, would this be something that people are genuinely interested in and or would it be wise to release into the wild?

Edit: There exists http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube but this is way different and does more than just search, not as heavy either thanks to the chromium engine.

Heh, developer of Streamus here! Found myself reading your comment, prepping to write a response, and then saw you'd already mentioned it! Huzzah!

Overall, I wouldn't worry too much about what you're doing. Streamus was terminated because of complaints from record labels. That's not an issue you'd encounter. Just don't make it so good that it suddenly gets re-built in-house! :)

The idea itself seems useful enough. I agree that many parts of YouTube's interface could have improved usability. It's difficult to get people to keep YouTube + your website open, but if you can implement enough of their features to warrant only being on your page then I don't see any issues.

I loved the heck out of that extension was also one of the early people giving feedback waay back, ended up just piping my playlists to youtube-dl via a cron near the end. I do recall reading a back and forth email convo between you and Yt where it seem they just randomly axed it for some opaque reason but thanks for the clarification. Thanks for the reply and tips!

Edit: Apparently this is explained in the article I linked above, I just grabbed a random one to link to. I hadn't looked into it other than the imgur email chain.

Hey, Hi! Haven't had the time to try Streamus when it was still active, but kudos on the extension!

I was wondering, how stupid would it be to bundle youtube-dl with a NWJS/Electron app and make a user accept an EULA where you have a disclaimer that you're not responsible for anything, and have the app function like Spotify but using youtube-dl to fetch the DASH m4a/opus audio files off of YouTube and play them, thereby removing ads and minimizing data usage...

I am in the process of making such an app, but not a lawyer, so not sure how well it'd go... It would be open source...

Hey :) Thanks.

I don't think you'd encounter any legal issues. You're not using YouTube's API to retrieve anything. That said, it's pretty easy to imagine how they could neuter the product if it grew large enough. It'd go down similar to AdBlock vs ad-network. Both sides constantly adding/changing keys, challenge responses & answers, etc.

You can put in place all the contractual provisions you want with the user but your relationship with the user is irrelevant. It is your relationship with the host/owner of the content that matters.

Streamus attracted Google's ire because it bypassed ads and separated out audio and visual content. Both of these attributes look to be features of your proposed app. On that basis it is likely to attract Google's attention.

Having said that, it's likely that they wouldn't bother pursuing you until your app became popular, as was the case with Streamus...

Sorry, just to clarify -- Streamus did not bypass ads. The minimum allowed video player is 200px * 200px, their ad network doesn't run on that small of a player because advertisers were unwilling to pay to have their ad shown that small. I was initially accused of this by their legal department, but if you read through the entire e-mail chain, you'll see they eventually relent and admit that advertisements are not an issue.

Additionally, I did patch in support for video content (and wrote a huge post on the tech. challenges of it: https://medium.com/@MeoMix/beautifully-buffered-bytes-ff798e...), but that proved insufficient.

YouTube took the view point that Chrome extensions should function similar to mobile apps not like browser tabs. They indicated they wanted the music paused whenever the main UI window minimized. I argued that would be like pausing YouTube when you click between tabs. They disagreed and terminated my API access.

what would be an acceptable amount of cache storage for such an app, would you think?

because one thing I don't like about streaming is that the content can be gone next time you want to hear it. I use youtube-dl to save videos (or often just the audio stream) because of this.

If you leave out the video stream, they're quite tiny (in context of modern storage). A quick scan of my saved .opus files, shows the same rough ~1MB/min filesize that 128k mp3s have (except with way better quality of course).

For simplicity, I wouldn't cache anything. Run youtube-dl with the JSON dump option to get all the sources, find the best source, put the URL into a <audio> element and that's it. At least that's how I'd do it.

Just give me a clean and simple way to sort my subscribed channels into groups, but also being able to group by title - some channels post a bunch of varied stuff all on the same channel and I find it annoying to keep track of the specific things I care about.

So, search?

If you aren't going to watch it until you are ready, it means you are still going to have to find it in whatever 'group' you make when you decide to. You could just search and hey, guess what, there they are.

I like Video Deck: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-deck-for-you...

Also as a web-app: https://youtube.videodeck.net/

What I'd love would be filtering features, which allow me to easily ignore certain series and cut down on updates I don't care about. Ideally with help to discover the right filter pattern, but regex would be fine for starters ;)

All I want is to be able to subscribe to channels that upload a lot without them completely clogging everything up. I want to be able to quarantine them off, so some sort of category function would be wonderful.

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