Show HN: I made this simple YouTube playlist maker. What do you think? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made this simple YouTube playlist maker. What do you think?

playr.me

23 pointsvishaldpatel44 comments

This is really well done & solves a pain point that I mostly never realized even existed. This is my default youtube client now.

That being said here are some improvements that you might want to consider:

1. I almost dismissed this as another thing that I'll never use until I found that search bar on the top right. You want to make sure it's visible at first glance.

2. Allow me to drag the volume slider.

3. The button next to the cross/remove is not very intuitive. Took a good 10 seconds before realizing I could drag it. Make tooltip available everywhere.

4. The default video width can be bigger.

5. If a video from the search result is playing, change its play button to a pause so I know that when I scan that list.

6. If there is one thing I'd want to carry from youtube here is recommendations. Sometimes I might not know what to search for. So have a tabbed view between search results & recommendations.

7. You'll probably come to this anyway but I'd like to create an account so I can save my playlists.

Best of luck.

Edit: PS: Just realized I could use a next/previous button.

Wow. Yes, 1 through 5 are in the works!

About accounts: Right now, everything is entirely client-side. What it does do though is update the address-bar whenever you add / remove a song to the playlist or rearrange the playlist, etc. This means that you can simply bookmark a playlist after creating it!

Previous / next: For now, we can double click on videos in the playlist to play them.

Nice. Bookmarked. I never liked how Youtube solved playlists. I like the URL pattern, because it makes it easy, to write a bookmarklet that turns all Youtube links on a page into a playlist. :)

Some room for improvement: Please add title attributes to the buttons. Also the loop-button is a bit confusing to me. Maybe standard icons as seen in many other players are easier to understand. It would be nice, to have the volume slider slideable.

Mixtube did a similar thing, but seems to be broken at the moment: http://mixtube.org/

Yes, for sure. I'll have nicer buttons with title tags soon.

I like it! Very clean and simple, personally I find YouTube's built-in playlists pretty clunky so this is nice to see. As a bonus, with something like this I never have to read youtube comments.

I would make the "Search youtube" thing more visible... it took me a while to notice it, I think most people might miss it.

I'd like to make the "Search youtube" visible for first-time users without making it in-your-face for repeat use. I'll play with the contrast a bit more. Thanks! :)

I seem to have maxed out the number of songs you can keep track of in one URL. See: http://bit.ly/10kZyKg which loads 130 songs, but my playlist is 156 songs long (until I close the tab I presume).

I'd love to see:

1. Way to save a playlist as a shortened URL for sharing purposes.

2. Previous/Next buttons

3. Max-width for the playlist that keeps each song on one line

4. A means to save several playlists in one place

5. More obvious shuffle/repeat buttons

Overall, I really like the simplicity of the interface. I hardly comment on HN these days, but I wanted to provide some constructive feedback for you.

Best,

Thanks!! Yes, I'll make all of these happen in upcoming updates. =)

Great! Is it possible you could let me know when the features go live?

Yup! =)

I love it. finally!

Things I love:

1. Search while you watch 2. minimalist interface design 3. dark color scheme 4. drag and drop sortable playlist

Things to add:

1. Mobile compatibility (doesn't work on my Galaxy Nexus) 2. Mobile compatible UI (bigger buttons, search bar, etc) 3. Ability to log in to save playlists, user settings 4. Ability to hide video, but leave audio ;)

Excellent job!

Oh man.. mobile compatibility. I have a nexus 4 coming in soon, so I might just give it a go. Making the video go away would make a few people happy for sure.

Give the user the ability to toggle video display. This does not violate Google policy. Everyone is happy ;)

PS. This project seems perfectly suited for AngularJS. Also, check out Foundation framework for making both the desktop and mobile versions of the site ;) good luck. I will surely check back soon. This is a great project.

Beautiful interface! I actually was throwing around the idea of an audio only Youtube player, can is there a way to toggle the video?

Yes, I think so, but I'll look into it and get back to you.

Should be, there was a similar kind of app online for a while at jukeboxfor.me. There you only played music from youtube, no video.

That would be good... I wonder if it's possible to remove the video entirely, as opposed to just hiding it - would be really useful when I listen to music on Youtube on battery power on my laptop!

Audio only Youtube player is against the Youtube terms of service. You have to display the video at a certain minimum size.

A friend of mine made something similar to this, but audio only, and - if I remember correctly - got a cease and desist. (Or, at least, he got some kind of "you're in breach of terms of service, cut it out" message, which freaked him out and prompted him to take the project offline).

Yes, I can see how it would annoy some content creators too. I'll check out the TOS for sure, thanks.

I'm just speculating out loud here...

They can mandate a minimum playback size, but do they mandate a minimum playback fps?

If you played the video back at a rate of 1/60fps (dropping all intermediate frames) would that satisfy their requirements and still save battery life or whatever for the people who would prefer not to see any video at all?

Just make it simple. Give users the ability to toggle the video display. That shouldn't violate any agreements.

Hey, I also played with this idea a while ago in tinycassette.com. I added soundcloud support too. I do not have the search feature yet, but I also made a chrome extension to control the player within the browser. Give it a look, we should partner :P

Thats pretty nifty too. Would love to meet up if you're in the Bay Area =).

Maybe some day. I'm from Portugal so it's a bit far from the Bay Area. Is this just a side project, do you have any greater plans for this? You already have a very nice domain.

This is a side-project. I made it for me and my friends and anyone who appreciates the limited scope of what it does - quickly look up videos, create playlists, share them and bookmark them.

Hah! I've been building something similar for personal use: http://bchanx.com/jukebox

I also like your interface, props!

Your's is pretty slick too. Are you going to keep working on it? Why did you create your particular player?

I give it some love whenever I have some spare time!

Mostly built it so I could generate playlists purely with songs that I enjoy, and be able to easily access that from anywhere and on any computer. I figure you're coming from a similar angle? :)

Yup! Same idea. Easily create playlists and share them. I decided to go with updating the address-bar instead of storing playlists server-side. That has it's limitations but saves me from storing anything on the server, for now.

Yours looks like you're going with accounts creation instead, which might end up being something I'll have to do.

Can you add a feature to make the videos one minute long. It'd be a killer app for making power hour playlists for college kids.

LOL. That is something I did not think about! =). What do you use right now to create them? Thanks!

What does clicking on the video names do? I mean, other than toggling the existence of a gray bar above the name.

You can double-click to play a video. You can also click and drag to rearrange the playlist! This will automatically update the address bar so you can then share the rearranged playlist.

I noticed these two features. What feature does the gray bar that you can toggle by single-clicking pertain to?

Gray bars: http://i.imgur.com/hic2avC.png

That particular feature is pure eye-candy =)

It's reasonable not to support it, and it might not be your fault, but you should know that I can't interact with the site at all with Conkeror running on Xulrunner 19.0.2.

Love it! Simple is always good.

Thats the plan! Simple and clean. Thanks =)

Clean easy to use, good job !

Thank you =)

This is really cool! good job

Sweet! Thanks :).

source code pls

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