Show HN: BackTrack – Standalone YouTube Media Library

Hi HN! I created BackTrack, a standalone web app for your YouTube video library.

Why it exists? I made this project because I was looking for an offline YouTube video library solution with background playback. I have looked at TubeArchivist, but it requires me running my own server. In addition, I also looked at apps like NewPipe, but it is only available for Android, while I am using iOS.

How it works? For adding videos, it can be either from pasting a YouTube link, or directly search from the web app, the search result is scraped from DuckDuckGo.

For retrieving the video metadata or downloading video, it calls YouTube API for a specific android app version, which doesn’t encrypt the video URL. I think they still have this for backward compatibility, as the newer version API will return the video URL with signature/token.

And in order to bypass the CORS restriction for both DDG and YT, I am using a CORS proxy.

For storage, it uses IndexedDB, which supports storing binaries.

For background playback and media controls, it uses plain old audio tag and Media Session API.

Hope you enjoy and find it useful.