You can also contribute to PipeLine, it’s a desktop client that aggregates YouTube and a few others. And it’s written in Rust.
The issue with YouTube is the network effect though. Even if you can get a lot of users to use one of those multi platform clients, it’s still hard to get the creators to leave. And till they stay, the users stay.
Huh, Pipeline. OK, I’ll look into that. No point in reinventing the wheel.
I was poking around Grayjay last night and saw that a lot of extensions I had in mind had already been added, but still no lean back couch mode (at least, without casting from phone).
That might work for you and I but isn’t generalizable (eg: kids, elder kin etc).
If Pipeline has an android TV fork, it will save me from engineering something out of spite.
PS: network effect is real but we / they forget sometimes that other things exist. YouTube is a frivolous luxury…and the quality has been sliding for a long time.
It would be the work of a weekend to yt-dlp the vids I’d like to keep and then switch off. Hell, I’d set up PinchFlat to run as a cron job twice a week an d/l shit into a folder so I can watch it off line if I have to.
Thinking out loud; I’d need a janitor process too: age-based expiry by default, but treat user likes as a retention signal. Thumbs-up could promote a video to a 30-day TTL; hard cap retention at 2 extensions unless explicitly locked, in which case it gets moved to a permanent archive folder.
If I cap quality to 720p, 1TB gets me rolling stock of what…2000 vids? I could integrate that directly as a folder in JF or Nova Player…shit…now I want to do it.
Anyhow, there are (very few) content creators I regularly watch on YT that aren’t elsewhere - the rest is opportunistic crap and brain rot the kids are in to.
I can engineer around all of that. Most people could.
The second Smarttube dies (it will; it’s too good at what it does) or the m.youtube pipe dries up, people will leave in droves.
My guess - and this is a guess - is that Google is deliberately playing whack-a-mole rather than going for one giant hard lockout all at once, because too much pain too quickly risks pushing people to the alternatives.
You can also contribute to PipeLine, it’s a desktop client that aggregates YouTube and a few others. And it’s written in Rust.
The issue with YouTube is the network effect though. Even if you can get a lot of users to use one of those multi platform clients, it’s still hard to get the creators to leave. And till they stay, the users stay.
Huh, Pipeline. OK, I’ll look into that. No point in reinventing the wheel.
I was poking around Grayjay last night and saw that a lot of extensions I had in mind had already been added, but still no lean back couch mode (at least, without casting from phone).
That might work for you and I but isn’t generalizable (eg: kids, elder kin etc).
If Pipeline has an android TV fork, it will save me from engineering something out of spite.
PS: network effect is real but we / they forget sometimes that other things exist. YouTube is a frivolous luxury…and the quality has been sliding for a long time.
It would be the work of a weekend to yt-dlp the vids I’d like to keep and then switch off. Hell, I’d set up PinchFlat to run as a cron job twice a week an d/l shit into a folder so I can watch it off line if I have to.
Thinking out loud; I’d need a janitor process too: age-based expiry by default, but treat user likes as a retention signal. Thumbs-up could promote a video to a 30-day TTL; hard cap retention at 2 extensions unless explicitly locked, in which case it gets moved to a permanent archive folder.
If I cap quality to 720p, 1TB gets me rolling stock of what…2000 vids? I could integrate that directly as a folder in JF or Nova Player…shit…now I want to do it.
Anyhow, there are (very few) content creators I regularly watch on YT that aren’t elsewhere - the rest is opportunistic crap and brain rot the kids are in to.
I can engineer around all of that. Most people could.
The second Smarttube dies (it will; it’s too good at what it does) or the m.youtube pipe dries up, people will leave in droves.
My guess - and this is a guess - is that Google is deliberately playing whack-a-mole rather than going for one giant hard lockout all at once, because too much pain too quickly risks pushing people to the alternatives.
Boiling frog and all that.