Tubalr, YouTube without all the bullshit. | Hacker News Reader

Tubalr, YouTube without all the bullshit.

tubalr.com

13 pointscjstewart8822 comments

Looking at this it's shocking to me how Google who became famous for their "less is more" approach to interface design have turned YouTube into a cluttered mess which reminds me of MySpace.

Youtube has always been kinda cluttered. I hear youtube is run mostly independently from the rest of google, so im not surprised that it is hasnt gotten the minimalist treatment

I don't like the wooden background. I think it's tacky, and it's precisely not the minimal approach you are promoting.

Otherwise: good work. The selection of music it gets me when selecting an artist is rather impressive. I can see me using this a lot.

Thanks man, I guess I can agree with you on the background.

Good work on fixing the background :) I feel the only thing missing is seeing what videos are coming up next. So rather than hitting "Next" and "Previous", it would be nice to see a row of thumbnail videos underneath the main video so I can skip around like a grooveshark playlist.

Edit - Gee willickers the site is fast! Really cool :D

Thanks man glad ya like it :) I like the idea of listing out upcoming songs... now only to figure out a way to do this without cluttering up the ui!

This is how i see it: http://imgur.com/dA15I

Unfortunately I'm not interested in registering stuff at imageshack.

Not really sure why thats showing up for a background, the images for the bg is hosted on the server.

I've been using this all day today. It's very nice but I wish I could enlarge the videos to full-screen.

I'll look into adding this ability, I tried enabling it today; however, it just wouldn't work. It added the icon to the player to go to full screen, but it simply would work. Glad you've had a use for the app and thanks for using it!

Yes I really it.

I hope you succeed with it, (and that YouTube goes the route of hiring you rather than shutting you down!)

On my wish list for your app would be the ability to synchronize two browsers to the same stream....

Hah, I wish, I dout anyone from YouTube will even notice it :P

Full-screen is now available, enjoy!

Are you doing anything to filter the non music-related results from youtube?

I'm just getting the 20 most relevant results.

How does it find similar artists?

I take the top 20 similar artist from the last.fm API and then take the number one video for each artist and serve them up :)

this is neat, can we get a tech overview of what's going on behind the scenes?

Heres something quick and dirty:

A user input's a band or artist... or really anything they want to. You can insert Football, Funny, LOL Cats, or anything else you can think of. I'm aiming for people to use Tubalr for bands and artists, but it dosnt really matter, long as it has a use!

Then Tubalr posts to YouTube.com and retrieves a list of the top YouTube videos for whatever was searched excluding videos that dont allow embeding(I post to gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/… to determine if its embeddable, and throw it out if its not). Then Tubalr does some parsing and rips out the video ids and puts them away for the next step.

Once there is a list of all the videos, I then use YouTube's API to embed the YouTube player with the correct video. The YouTube API allows you to determine on the fly if a video is paused, finished, or any other state you can think of. Once a video is complete, it simply embeds the next video, using some jquery and a .php file with the player in it.

So what if a user hits the "Similar Artist/Bands"... well, Tubalr uses audioscrobbler.net's API by doing something like below!

Tubalr hits ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/artist/ARTIST_NAME_HERE/… and grabs the top 20 similar artists/bands and stores them for the next step.

Once Tubalr has the list of 20 similar bands/artists, it hits YouTube up for the number one video for each artists.

Then, after Tubalr has all the similar videos we just use the YouTube API to embed just like we did for the default option!

give it a shot

interesting, was able to scroll Canibus's music as if it was a DVD menu! lovely. Using apis, scraping or pattern mining?

YouTube and Last.FM's APIs

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