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Show HN: Tube – Minimalist YouTube

220 points by madamelic 9y ago

madamelic 9y ago
Hey all! I tossed this together because I had trouble with YouTube and its rabbit hole. I wanted a way to still watch my favorite people without a lot of noise + distraction. I also use YouTube for live music while working (which is an issue if I get distracted by a neat looking video) So I made Tube. It is just a search box and it shows you the top few results, you click on one and all you get is the player. Let me know what you think. This is the first time I'm showing it off so there is likely still some rough edges! :)
- mariedm 9y ago
  First, I'm probably not the only one but I find ads really annoying. Also, I always find myself spending so much time on Youtube when I was just coming for one video, that can be problematic. I think Tube is simple but effective.
  - madamelic 9y ago
    Unfortunately, it won't filter out pre-roll ads, but there is always YouTube Red, if you dislike ads and don't hate Google.
    - sakuronto 9y ago
      And there are always ad blockers, if you dislike ads but do hate Google!
      - ucaetano 9y ago
        And hate the content producers too!
        ealhad 9y ago
        All the content producers I follow have either a Patreon or a Tipeee page, which allows me to give them some money (probably much more than what they would earn if I watched the ads).
        dawnerd 9y ago
        Considering just about everyone I watch ends up being demonized that’s not such a bad thing.
    - stephengillie 9y ago
      YouTube Red is nice, but so many videos bake-in ads. It would be nice to have a player only play selected portions of a video; for a video with an ad baked in from 0:11 to 0:41, the player would play from 0:00 to 0:11, then auto-skip from 0:11 to 0:41, and continue playing. These could be set from an earlier viewing, suggested by the site by other viewer behavior, or have common shows have a "time file"of clips to skip to. "Abridged" shows could use a "time file" and subtitle track for easier content creation.
    - dingaling 9y ago
      > but there is always YouTube Red For the majority of the World there is not
- laylomo 9y ago
  This is awesome! Is the code available as open source anywhere? I might be interested in making my own personal deployment because I think youtube is far too distracting
  - madamelic 9y ago
    Oh! Yeah, I can totally do that tonight. I'll link it (I have to remove a key from the code... oooops. :))
- JosefStoolen 9y ago
  This is the best software ever written. Salut.
  - madamelic 9y ago
    Aww, thanks! :)
- asfgionio 9y ago
  I would look at Youtube Feather. It was a stripped-down version of Youtube Google made several years back. Sadly it's discontinued now. I think you've gone too far. Tearing out bloat and psychological manipulation is good, but it should have playlists, channels, and search filters. Those are important features for finding videos.
  - madamelic 9y ago
    >Tearing out bloat and psychological manipulation is good, but it should have playlists, channels, and search filters. I'll definitely consider it. I didn't expect it to get this response to be honest. The target is more about cutting out the psychological rabbit hole, less about making it really light (although it would be a nice side effect)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pandasun 9y ago
This is so great! Could you tell us a bit about how it works behind the scenes?
- madamelic 9y ago
  Yeah, it uses the YouTube API to search for videos. I am using another service to re-size the images to the right size (it still isn't perfect as you may notice), because some banners are slightly different sizes. Then, on the /watch page, I embedded the YouTube player with a responsive design so you can view on both mobile + desktop (before, the player was HUGE on mobile) It is quite simple thankfully.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    The responsive design is great. I've been wishing that would become a standard option on video sites for some time. Full screen is rarely what I want and Theater Mode doesn't cut it. One suggestion, a black background and, if possible, vertically centered video might make it feel a bit more polished when the window ratio doesn't match the video.
InterestBazinga 9y ago
I really appreciate this. Thank you.
baal80spam 9y ago
This is awesome, thank you!
lucb1e 9y ago
I started a project to make websites like this for all websites, but didn't get very far. I feel like pretty much every other website could use a lightweight and fast version. Creating those versions is a lot of boring work, though, as you're just parsing DOMs or APIs and there is no challenge to it. (Never mind when they change the HTML again.) Thanks for creating this one!
- JulienRbrt 9y ago
  One thing I love to do is to block all the garbage of websites with uBlock Origin by adding my own filters. That does not give a result as good as this project but it quicker to do.
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    Yes. One example where this worked particularly well for me is the Youtube homepage, where I blocked all the content so only the search bar and sidebar are still visible. They've since changed the html and I have since made two workarounds for the homepage, but for years that saved me from getting distracted by all the crap people watch and forgetting what I was going to search for.
  - ealhad 9y ago
    For this, you could use uMatrix (by the same author).
- nearmuse 9y ago
  It would be easier to "make" these with semantic web. Maybe your browser would just have some generic viewer so that you would not have to make any at all.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    I'm writing a small JavaScript engine that converts websites to JSON, and displays JSON as websites. Since an entire site is described in the same JSON file, the whole site is a single download, and it rebuilds pages in the browser instead of calling the server - much faster, especially on mobile. If the browser had this small engine, it could render these sites natively.
bussierem 9y ago
If I could make a design suggestion, from a minimalist perspective: When showing results, the text that you choose to show kinda feels like the design equivalent of "HEY YO WELCOME TO MY CHANNEL MASH THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON!!!". When looking at what to display for a video, maybe consider just <Video Title>, and <Channel Link> below that? Other thing - Maybe have some kind of simple "searching..." indicator? I hit enter, and the feedback for it was nil, so I just assumed my keystroke didn't actually search, then all of a sudden stuff just popped up. Other than that, this is really cool! Nice and simple, very usable.
- madamelic 9y ago
  >When looking at what to display for a video, maybe consider just <Video Title>, and <Channel Link> below that? I can definitely do that. The search term I was using while designing returned much nicer descriptions. I'll just remove them completely. >Other thing - Maybe have some kind of simple "searching..." indicator? I agree. It is definitely an oversight. Thanks! :)
  - bussierem 9y ago
    Sounds like a fun project, I'm glad it turned out so well - I wish you luck with everything!
Bulbasaur2015 9y ago
very cool. i prefer this than then the real one. YT has too much fluff and rabbit hole material
of 9y ago
This is freaking perfect. Thank you
RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
For some time I've been tinkering with a script which manages my own fine-grained youtube subscription preferences, periodically scrapes various pages for metadata, and then as necessary extracts videos by using the youtube-dl utility. The end result is a directory on my machine which always has a few interesting videos to watch, ad-free, tracking-free, network connection free, using my favorite full-featured video playback tools. I think others seeking a minimalist youtube experience might enjoy youtube-dl: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
- striking 9y ago
  Could you release some part of that script too? It sounds really interesting.
- lozf 9y ago
  I've been a youtube-dl fan for a long time -- it was essential whilst traveling a few years ago with suboptimal 3G bandwidth... these days I usually just paste the URL in to a terminal after typing `mpv` for a minimal experience but still with all the control you might want for playback speed, brightness, screenshots, & skipping around etc. Those who prefer a GUI could use SMplayer.
- goda90 9y ago
  How well does youtube-dl deal with video playback being restricted to play only from youtube.com? For instance this Tube site can't really play most music videos.
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    Well.
- chriswarbo 9y ago
  youtube-dl is really cool, and supports loads of sites as well as just youtube. VLC can also play youtube URLs directly, although buffering can be annoying. There's also a Python package called "whitey" which provides an ncurses interface for searching youtube, and sending videos to e.g. mplayer or youtube-dl. If you want to "subscribe" without needing an account, every youtube channel provides an RSS feed (look in the <head> of the page source).
iceprey 9y ago
I think this is a good idea, but it seems like you've made the .css file more minimalist than the actual website. I guess there's a distinction to be drawn between making YouTube less appealing to get distracted by, and making the YouTube experience nicer by reducing distraction and noise. If you're going for the latter, here are a few tweaks I would suggest: * Pick a more aesthetically pleasing than default font, ditch the blue default link colors. * Normalize the thumbnail size. * Consider normalizing the video titles to all lowercase. It's still possible to search for something and see all caps everywhere which feels very noisy to my brain. * Consider leaving the descriptions off altogether But still, very cool idea!
- madamelic 9y ago
  Thanks for the recommendations. I will definitely work on these. :)
butz 9y ago
This could be "code golfed" into even smaller app. Ditch all third party resources: jquery (use vanilla js), stripe (why?), fontawesome (just use some inline svg symbols), tachyons (you could probably write few custom CSS rules yourself and throw in some minimalistic styling too). Not sure about usefulness of service workers, as youtube app won't work offline.
- pvg 9y ago
  It's strangely huge for what it does (presumably author was going for just visual minimalism), trimming it down is wouldn't exactly be 'code golf'.
- madamelic 9y ago
  Heh. Yeah, you kind of got me there. I re-use the same template for all of my sites. Those must've missed my trimming. I'll remove them tonight. Thanks!
nerdymanchild 9y ago
IANAL but I think this might be a violation of YouTube ToS
- matte_black 9y ago
  Even if it was you could just self host it and have your own private Tube site.
- madamelic 9y ago
  Ah, ok. Hopefully they don't nuke my account. No scraping or mean stuff, it's all above board and using Google's APIs.
  - nerdymanchild 9y ago
    Check the ToS of their APIs. I'm somewhat certain you aren't allowed to build alternative interfaces into their content.
    - godot 9y ago
      I'm not OP, but that would be strange -- they offer a search API and a video player API. It would mean that they offer all the tools for you to build an alternative interface and then not let you do that?
      - ashnehete 9y ago
        True all these tools together can be used for building an alternative interface, but the company actually have APIs so that external services are able to integrate into their ecosystem. All the APIs are meant to be used together but each service can choose the API they see fit.
semasad 9y ago
Minimalist != ugly and unuseful.
kang 9y ago
Few years ago there were sites like cull.tv and mox.tv that were really amazing interfaces for youtube. Its sad that now doesn't even exist a demo somewhere(?)
- bluedino 9y ago
  I thought there were also sites like this that you could make music playlists on and share them with others
drivers99 9y ago
I'm seeing a permanent back arrow overlapping the video itself. Don't cover up the screen. At the end of the video, it still shows recommendations. Do you have any control over that? Can you set it to not show recommendations? It is missing comments. I can see why you would choose that, but I'd rather have comments (something I also miss when I watch YouTube on a Roku) and still not have recommendations because they lead to watching too many videos.
- madamelic 9y ago
  >I'm seeing a permanent back arrow overlapping the video itself. Don't cover up the screen. Removed that. Originally I wanted it to make it easy to go search more, but meh, people can use the back button. :) >At the end of the video, it still shows recommendations. Do you have any control over that? Can you set it to not show recommendations? Not as far as I know. And from what I've read from YouTube's ToS, it wouldn't be ok with them. (Can't disable functionality) >It is missing comments. I can see why you would choose that, but I'd rather have comments (something I also miss when I watch YouTube on a Roku) and still not have recommendations because they lead to watching too many videos. I'll consider adding them on dropdown. :)
  - detaro 9y ago
    The embedding API has an option for related videos at the end: https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters#rel https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters#rel
bagre45 9y ago
If you are looking for a lightweight, less minimalist youtube interface, there is tonvid[1], used by smtube. [1] http://www.tonvid.com/ http://www.tonvid.com/
krrrh 9y ago
Hijacking this thread to share other approaches to YouTube without YouTube. This site takes a YouTube URL, extracts the audio and adds a link to your personal podcast feed on huffduffer. It’s great for loading a bunch of interviews, lectures, and other things that don’t require the video into your podcast player. https://snarfed.org/2015-03-07_huffduff-video https://snarfed.org/2015-03-07_huffduff-video
- epiapp 9y ago
  Another approach for YouTube without YouTube: subscribe to YouTube channels and playlists by RSS. I set up an app for this. Just head over to https://www.epiyoutube.com https://www.epiyoutube.com. Or whenever you're on YouTube and viewing a channel, user, or playlist, just add 'epi' to the url, right in front of 'youtube,' and there's your RSS feed. Oh, and another approach: watch YouTube videos on Bing Videos. I actually use that more than I use my RSS app. Just make sure you've got your adblocker on, and you're all set.
- kristopolous 9y ago
  I've been working on a "streaming music" version of youtube for about 10 years off and on (https://github.com/kristopolous/ytmix https://github.com/kristopolous/ytmix) ... it's really designed for self-hosted personal use. I use it probably an hour or two a day.
textmode 9y ago
I have a 2-line shell script using only sed and curl (or equivalent) that obviates any need for youtube-dl, python, third party websites, etc. Unlike youtube-dl it will not download videos where the uploader is some commercial media outlet that wants to prohibit downloading.
- ravenstine 9y ago
  Can you post this somewhere? Maybe a Github Gist?
  - textmode 9y ago
    As requested, see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=textmode https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=textmode Example usage: argv0 22 file Where argv0 is the name of the script. Where 22 is itag no. for HD mp4. 18 is itag no. for a lower quality mp4. Will save video as file.mp4 If get HTTP 302, then retry. If get HTTP 403, then retry or give up; video is probably commercial in nature and has restrictions.
    - ravenstine 9y ago
      That links to your user profile. Wrong link?
ealhad 9y ago
If you want a standalone app, I would recommand youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer CLI and GTK!
geuis 9y ago
So minimal it doesn’t do anything on a mobile device?
tejasmanohar 9y ago
Does this seem down for anyone else? All my requests seem to be "pending" in Chrome's network tab.
gnuvince 9y ago
I searched for "darkest dungeon" and first hits were for Ed Sheeran and One Direction. I know searching is a tricky problem, but this is ridiculously bad.
- austenallred 9y ago
  I got the same results for a completely unrelated term. Probably something hard-coded it's falling back on?
  - godot 9y ago
    I just tried "darkest dungeon" and didn't get that, and it's the same as the ones on https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=darkest+dungeon https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=darkest+dungeon . Actually, I can't see why OP wouldn't just use YT's search API (they have one). I'm pretty sure that's what OP uses. So yeah, like you said, probably some hard-coded fall-back.
mysterypie 9y ago
This does not work for me. No matter what I search for I get the same results, namely, Marvel Studios' Avengers, Ed Sheeran, One Direction, etc.
- dsnuh 9y ago
  Same here.
- mysterypie 9y ago
  I went back and tried it again a day later, and now it works -- it finds videos related to the topic I search for. Whatever the problem was, the author has now fixed it.
jmadsen 9y ago
Are there any alternatives out there that let me: 1) Oauth2 into my account so I can see new postings in my subscriptions (not "the one you've been avoiding clicking for 8 weeks") 2) Minimalist dashboard that doesn't have all the "recommended for you" clutter 3) Simple search results like the one here? 4) A "show me similar" button next to vids that would let me pick out my own recommendations if I want to expand on what I'm watching, and not get signed up for all the crap their broken algos throw at me
tobyhinloopen 9y ago
Why is the aspect ratio of the videos weird? Fixed height, ~100% width? Why not 16:9 of window-size?
blablablerg 9y ago
Thanks a lot for this! When I need to focus, sometimes I need to look stuff up on youtube and then I get distracted by all the clickbait meme shite. Now I can use this site.
Douger 9y ago
I have wanted exactly this for over a year. Thank you for making it.
stockkid 9y ago
I really like the minimal design. One thing: when I am in the video view, I'd like <body> margin to be 0 so that there is no awkward white space around the video.
startupflix 9y ago
Brilliant stuff! followed the development on wip.chat
007lva 9y ago
Looks nice, very similar to https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/ https://github.com/omarroth/invidious https://github.com/omarroth/invidious (written in Crystal)
jaipilot747 9y ago
Kind of tangential, but I am enjoying NewPipe[0], which can be installed from F-droid. Background audio, video on overlay mode so you can watch it while using some other app, downloading videos/audio. Supports YouTube and SoundCloud. [0] https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/
AlphaMike 9y ago
Yes, but It's really easy thing to do, they should make this greater than this time. It's not good just based on widget.

220 points by madamelic 9y ago

Hey all! I tossed this together because I had trouble with YouTube and its rabbit hole. I wanted a way to still watch my favorite people without a lot of noise + distraction. I also use YouTube for live music while working (which is an issue if I get distracted by a neat looking video) So I made Tube. It is just a search box and it shows you the top few results, you click on one and all you get is the player. Let me know what you think. This is the first time I'm showing it off so there is likely still some rough edges! :)

mariedm 9y ago
First, I'm probably not the only one but I find ads really annoying. Also, I always find myself spending so much time on Youtube when I was just coming for one video, that can be problematic. I think Tube is simple but effective.
- madamelic 9y ago
  Unfortunately, it won't filter out pre-roll ads, but there is always YouTube Red, if you dislike ads and don't hate Google.
  - sakuronto 9y ago
    And there are always ad blockers, if you dislike ads but do hate Google!
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      And hate the content producers too!
      - ealhad 9y ago
        All the content producers I follow have either a Patreon or a Tipeee page, which allows me to give them some money (probably much more than what they would earn if I watched the ads).
      - dawnerd 9y ago
        Considering just about everyone I watch ends up being demonized that’s not such a bad thing.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    YouTube Red is nice, but so many videos bake-in ads. It would be nice to have a player only play selected portions of a video; for a video with an ad baked in from 0:11 to 0:41, the player would play from 0:00 to 0:11, then auto-skip from 0:11 to 0:41, and continue playing. These could be set from an earlier viewing, suggested by the site by other viewer behavior, or have common shows have a "time file"of clips to skip to. "Abridged" shows could use a "time file" and subtitle track for easier content creation.
  - dingaling 9y ago
    > but there is always YouTube Red For the majority of the World there is not
laylomo 9y ago
This is awesome! Is the code available as open source anywhere? I might be interested in making my own personal deployment because I think youtube is far too distracting
- madamelic 9y ago
  Oh! Yeah, I can totally do that tonight. I'll link it (I have to remove a key from the code... oooops. :))
JosefStoolen 9y ago
This is the best software ever written. Salut.
- madamelic 9y ago
  Aww, thanks! :)
asfgionio 9y ago
I would look at Youtube Feather. It was a stripped-down version of Youtube Google made several years back. Sadly it's discontinued now. I think you've gone too far. Tearing out bloat and psychological manipulation is good, but it should have playlists, channels, and search filters. Those are important features for finding videos.
- madamelic 9y ago
  >Tearing out bloat and psychological manipulation is good, but it should have playlists, channels, and search filters. I'll definitely consider it. I didn't expect it to get this response to be honest. The target is more about cutting out the psychological rabbit hole, less about making it really light (although it would be a nice side effect)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pandasun 9y ago

This is so great! Could you tell us a bit about how it works behind the scenes?

madamelic 9y ago
Yeah, it uses the YouTube API to search for videos. I am using another service to re-size the images to the right size (it still isn't perfect as you may notice), because some banners are slightly different sizes. Then, on the /watch page, I embedded the YouTube player with a responsive design so you can view on both mobile + desktop (before, the player was HUGE on mobile) It is quite simple thankfully.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  The responsive design is great. I've been wishing that would become a standard option on video sites for some time. Full screen is rarely what I want and Theater Mode doesn't cut it. One suggestion, a black background and, if possible, vertically centered video might make it feel a bit more polished when the window ratio doesn't match the video.

InterestBazinga 9y ago

I really appreciate this. Thank you.

baal80spam 9y ago

This is awesome, thank you!

lucb1e 9y ago

I started a project to make websites like this for all websites, but didn't get very far. I feel like pretty much every other website could use a lightweight and fast version. Creating those versions is a lot of boring work, though, as you're just parsing DOMs or APIs and there is no challenge to it. (Never mind when they change the HTML again.) Thanks for creating this one!

JulienRbrt 9y ago
One thing I love to do is to block all the garbage of websites with uBlock Origin by adding my own filters. That does not give a result as good as this project but it quicker to do.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  Yes. One example where this worked particularly well for me is the Youtube homepage, where I blocked all the content so only the search bar and sidebar are still visible. They've since changed the html and I have since made two workarounds for the homepage, but for years that saved me from getting distracted by all the crap people watch and forgetting what I was going to search for.
- ealhad 9y ago
  For this, you could use uMatrix (by the same author).
nearmuse 9y ago
It would be easier to "make" these with semantic web. Maybe your browser would just have some generic viewer so that you would not have to make any at all.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  I'm writing a small JavaScript engine that converts websites to JSON, and displays JSON as websites. Since an entire site is described in the same JSON file, the whole site is a single download, and it rebuilds pages in the browser instead of calling the server - much faster, especially on mobile. If the browser had this small engine, it could render these sites natively.

bussierem 9y ago

If I could make a design suggestion, from a minimalist perspective: When showing results, the text that you choose to show kinda feels like the design equivalent of "HEY YO WELCOME TO MY CHANNEL MASH THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON!!!". When looking at what to display for a video, maybe consider just <Video Title>, and <Channel Link> below that? Other thing - Maybe have some kind of simple "searching..." indicator? I hit enter, and the feedback for it was nil, so I just assumed my keystroke didn't actually search, then all of a sudden stuff just popped up. Other than that, this is really cool! Nice and simple, very usable.

madamelic 9y ago
>When looking at what to display for a video, maybe consider just <Video Title>, and <Channel Link> below that? I can definitely do that. The search term I was using while designing returned much nicer descriptions. I'll just remove them completely. >Other thing - Maybe have some kind of simple "searching..." indicator? I agree. It is definitely an oversight. Thanks! :)
- bussierem 9y ago
  Sounds like a fun project, I'm glad it turned out so well - I wish you luck with everything!

Bulbasaur2015 9y ago

very cool. i prefer this than then the real one. YT has too much fluff and rabbit hole material

of 9y ago

This is freaking perfect. Thank you

RodgerTheGreat 9y ago

For some time I've been tinkering with a script which manages my own fine-grained youtube subscription preferences, periodically scrapes various pages for metadata, and then as necessary extracts videos by using the youtube-dl utility. The end result is a directory on my machine which always has a few interesting videos to watch, ad-free, tracking-free, network connection free, using my favorite full-featured video playback tools. I think others seeking a minimalist youtube experience might enjoy youtube-dl: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

striking 9y ago
Could you release some part of that script too? It sounds really interesting.
lozf 9y ago
I've been a youtube-dl fan for a long time -- it was essential whilst traveling a few years ago with suboptimal 3G bandwidth... these days I usually just paste the URL in to a terminal after typing `mpv` for a minimal experience but still with all the control you might want for playback speed, brightness, screenshots, & skipping around etc. Those who prefer a GUI could use SMplayer.
goda90 9y ago
How well does youtube-dl deal with video playback being restricted to play only from youtube.com? For instance this Tube site can't really play most music videos.
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  Well.
chriswarbo 9y ago
youtube-dl is really cool, and supports loads of sites as well as just youtube. VLC can also play youtube URLs directly, although buffering can be annoying. There's also a Python package called "whitey" which provides an ncurses interface for searching youtube, and sending videos to e.g. mplayer or youtube-dl. If you want to "subscribe" without needing an account, every youtube channel provides an RSS feed (look in the <head> of the page source).

iceprey 9y ago

I think this is a good idea, but it seems like you've made the .css file more minimalist than the actual website. I guess there's a distinction to be drawn between making YouTube less appealing to get distracted by, and making the YouTube experience nicer by reducing distraction and noise. If you're going for the latter, here are a few tweaks I would suggest: * Pick a more aesthetically pleasing than default font, ditch the blue default link colors. * Normalize the thumbnail size. * Consider normalizing the video titles to all lowercase. It's still possible to search for something and see all caps everywhere which feels very noisy to my brain. * Consider leaving the descriptions off altogether But still, very cool idea!

madamelic 9y ago
Thanks for the recommendations. I will definitely work on these. :)

butz 9y ago

This could be "code golfed" into even smaller app. Ditch all third party resources: jquery (use vanilla js), stripe (why?), fontawesome (just use some inline svg symbols), tachyons (you could probably write few custom CSS rules yourself and throw in some minimalistic styling too). Not sure about usefulness of service workers, as youtube app won't work offline.

pvg 9y ago
It's strangely huge for what it does (presumably author was going for just visual minimalism), trimming it down is wouldn't exactly be 'code golf'.
madamelic 9y ago
Heh. Yeah, you kind of got me there. I re-use the same template for all of my sites. Those must've missed my trimming. I'll remove them tonight. Thanks!

nerdymanchild 9y ago

IANAL but I think this might be a violation of YouTube ToS

matte_black 9y ago
Even if it was you could just self host it and have your own private Tube site.
madamelic 9y ago
Ah, ok. Hopefully they don't nuke my account. No scraping or mean stuff, it's all above board and using Google's APIs.
- nerdymanchild 9y ago
  Check the ToS of their APIs. I'm somewhat certain you aren't allowed to build alternative interfaces into their content.
  - godot 9y ago
    I'm not OP, but that would be strange -- they offer a search API and a video player API. It would mean that they offer all the tools for you to build an alternative interface and then not let you do that?
    - ashnehete 9y ago
      True all these tools together can be used for building an alternative interface, but the company actually have APIs so that external services are able to integrate into their ecosystem. All the APIs are meant to be used together but each service can choose the API they see fit.

semasad 9y ago

Minimalist != ugly and unuseful.

kang 9y ago

Few years ago there were sites like cull.tv and mox.tv that were really amazing interfaces for youtube. Its sad that now doesn't even exist a demo somewhere(?)

bluedino 9y ago
I thought there were also sites like this that you could make music playlists on and share them with others

drivers99 9y ago

I'm seeing a permanent back arrow overlapping the video itself. Don't cover up the screen. At the end of the video, it still shows recommendations. Do you have any control over that? Can you set it to not show recommendations? It is missing comments. I can see why you would choose that, but I'd rather have comments (something I also miss when I watch YouTube on a Roku) and still not have recommendations because they lead to watching too many videos.

madamelic 9y ago
>I'm seeing a permanent back arrow overlapping the video itself. Don't cover up the screen. Removed that. Originally I wanted it to make it easy to go search more, but meh, people can use the back button. :) >At the end of the video, it still shows recommendations. Do you have any control over that? Can you set it to not show recommendations? Not as far as I know. And from what I've read from YouTube's ToS, it wouldn't be ok with them. (Can't disable functionality) >It is missing comments. I can see why you would choose that, but I'd rather have comments (something I also miss when I watch YouTube on a Roku) and still not have recommendations because they lead to watching too many videos. I'll consider adding them on dropdown. :)
- detaro 9y ago
  The embedding API has an option for related videos at the end: https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters#rel https://developers.google.com/youtube/player_parameters#rel

bagre45 9y ago

If you are looking for a lightweight, less minimalist youtube interface, there is tonvid[1], used by smtube. [1] http://www.tonvid.com/ http://www.tonvid.com/

krrrh 9y ago

Hijacking this thread to share other approaches to YouTube without YouTube. This site takes a YouTube URL, extracts the audio and adds a link to your personal podcast feed on huffduffer. It’s great for loading a bunch of interviews, lectures, and other things that don’t require the video into your podcast player. https://snarfed.org/2015-03-07_huffduff-video https://snarfed.org/2015-03-07_huffduff-video

epiapp 9y ago
Another approach for YouTube without YouTube: subscribe to YouTube channels and playlists by RSS. I set up an app for this. Just head over to https://www.epiyoutube.com https://www.epiyoutube.com. Or whenever you're on YouTube and viewing a channel, user, or playlist, just add 'epi' to the url, right in front of 'youtube,' and there's your RSS feed. Oh, and another approach: watch YouTube videos on Bing Videos. I actually use that more than I use my RSS app. Just make sure you've got your adblocker on, and you're all set.
kristopolous 9y ago
I've been working on a "streaming music" version of youtube for about 10 years off and on (https://github.com/kristopolous/ytmix https://github.com/kristopolous/ytmix) ... it's really designed for self-hosted personal use. I use it probably an hour or two a day.

textmode 9y ago

I have a 2-line shell script using only sed and curl (or equivalent) that obviates any need for youtube-dl, python, third party websites, etc. Unlike youtube-dl it will not download videos where the uploader is some commercial media outlet that wants to prohibit downloading.

ravenstine 9y ago
Can you post this somewhere? Maybe a Github Gist?
- textmode 9y ago
  As requested, see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=textmode https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=textmode Example usage: argv0 22 file Where argv0 is the name of the script. Where 22 is itag no. for HD mp4. 18 is itag no. for a lower quality mp4. Will save video as file.mp4 If get HTTP 302, then retry. If get HTTP 403, then retry or give up; video is probably commercial in nature and has restrictions.
  - ravenstine 9y ago
    That links to your user profile. Wrong link?

ealhad 9y ago

If you want a standalone app, I would recommand youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer CLI and GTK!

geuis 9y ago

So minimal it doesn’t do anything on a mobile device?

tejasmanohar 9y ago

Does this seem down for anyone else? All my requests seem to be "pending" in Chrome's network tab.

gnuvince 9y ago

I searched for "darkest dungeon" and first hits were for Ed Sheeran and One Direction. I know searching is a tricky problem, but this is ridiculously bad.

austenallred 9y ago
I got the same results for a completely unrelated term. Probably something hard-coded it's falling back on?
- godot 9y ago
  I just tried "darkest dungeon" and didn't get that, and it's the same as the ones on https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=darkest+dungeon https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=darkest+dungeon . Actually, I can't see why OP wouldn't just use YT's search API (they have one). I'm pretty sure that's what OP uses. So yeah, like you said, probably some hard-coded fall-back.

mysterypie 9y ago

This does not work for me. No matter what I search for I get the same results, namely, Marvel Studios' Avengers, Ed Sheeran, One Direction, etc.

dsnuh 9y ago
Same here.
mysterypie 9y ago
I went back and tried it again a day later, and now it works -- it finds videos related to the topic I search for. Whatever the problem was, the author has now fixed it.

jmadsen 9y ago

Are there any alternatives out there that let me: 1) Oauth2 into my account so I can see new postings in my subscriptions (not "the one you've been avoiding clicking for 8 weeks") 2) Minimalist dashboard that doesn't have all the "recommended for you" clutter 3) Simple search results like the one here? 4) A "show me similar" button next to vids that would let me pick out my own recommendations if I want to expand on what I'm watching, and not get signed up for all the crap their broken algos throw at me

tobyhinloopen 9y ago

Why is the aspect ratio of the videos weird? Fixed height, ~100% width? Why not 16:9 of window-size?

blablablerg 9y ago

Thanks a lot for this! When I need to focus, sometimes I need to look stuff up on youtube and then I get distracted by all the clickbait meme shite. Now I can use this site.

Douger 9y ago

I have wanted exactly this for over a year. Thank you for making it.

stockkid 9y ago

I really like the minimal design. One thing: when I am in the video view, I'd like <body> margin to be 0 so that there is no awkward white space around the video.

startupflix 9y ago

Brilliant stuff! followed the development on wip.chat

007lva 9y ago

Looks nice, very similar to https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/ https://github.com/omarroth/invidious https://github.com/omarroth/invidious (written in Crystal)

jaipilot747 9y ago

Kind of tangential, but I am enjoying NewPipe[0], which can be installed from F-droid. Background audio, video on overlay mode so you can watch it while using some other app, downloading videos/audio. Supports YouTube and SoundCloud. [0] https://newpipe.schabi.org/ https://newpipe.schabi.org/

AlphaMike 9y ago

Yes, but It's really easy thing to do, they should make this greater than this time. It's not good just based on widget.