The title is the link now, and looks like nothing: it keeps its colour
and carries no underline, since dressing it up would compete with the
video for attention. The pointer and the tooltip say the rest.
Views and age move onto that line, in the same small quiet grey, and
the "› Description" disclosure underneath is gone — one line instead of
two, and the description gets a proper modal with room to read it.
Addresses in a description are plain text as YouTube stores them; they
are found and made clickable, and open in the real browser. Trailing
punctuation is trimmed from the target: a full stop ends the sentence,
not the address.
Verified in the running app on a description with three consecutive
affiliate links, all three of which came out as links — the test for
one uses startsWith rather than a global regex, whose lastIndex carries
between calls and would have left every other address as plain text.
This is a video player, so the keys fingers already know should work.
space / k play, pause
j / l ten seconds back, forward
← / → five seconds
↑ / ↓ volume
0–9 jump to that tenth of the video
Home / End the ends
m mute
f fullscreen
i Picture in Picture, YouTube's miniplayer
c subtitles on or off
, / . one frame back or forward, while paused
shift , / . slower, faster
shift N / P next, previous video
Escape leave fullscreen, then close the player
Speed gets a chip in the transport bar when it is not 1×, since nothing
else there would say so, and clicking it goes back to normal. The other
buttons now name their key in the tooltip.
Arrow keys are taken from a focused slider, which would otherwise seek
by a tenth of a second rather than five. Typing in a field is left
alone, as are the system's own modifier combinations. A frame is taken
as a thirtieth of a second, since a video element will not say what its
frame rate is.
Verified in the running app: 5 jumped to exactly half, j seeked, m
muted, shift-. reached 1.5×, c turned subtitles off and on again, and
shift+N moved to the next video.
The transport buttons have said "Play (space)" and "Full screen (f)"
since they were built, with nothing listening for either key. Pressing
f did nothing, which is exactly what a broken fullscreen button looks
like.
Both now work, verified in the running app: f enters and leaves
fullscreen, space plays and pauses. Space is prevented from also
pressing whichever button has focus, and neither fires while typing in
a field or alongside a modifier.
Escape now asks to leave fullscreen before the player considers
closing, so one keypress cannot drop you all the way back to the feed.
The button itself was never broken: it was checked on a downloaded
video, on a stream, and inside a window already in macOS fullscreen,
entering and leaving each time.
A toggle under Playback in Settings, off by default and remembered.
Verified offline with forced offline mode on: a downloaded video ran to
its end and the next one started by itself, 6/51 to 7/51, with no
network.
It follows the same list the Next button does, which already steps to
the next *playable* video — offline that is the next download, so it
plays through what is on the Mac one after another. Online it will
stream the next video, and the Settings text says so: a toggle that
quietly does nothing outside one hidden condition is how the subtitle
preference went wrong three times.
The last video in the list simply stops; there is nowhere to go and
Next is already absent there.
It read as a caption but behaves like a link, so it now looks like one:
a pill beside the position counter, outlined until hovered. Clicking it
closes the player and narrows the feed to that channel, clearing the
search box on the way — the same thing the channel name under a
thumbnail already does.
One fixed size cannot suit everyone — the default was too big, then
too small. The subtitle menu in the transport bar now carries an
Appearance section: Size (S/M/L/XL), Font (Sans/Serif/Mono) and Place
(Bottom/Raised/Top). Choices apply at once and are remembered across
videos and launches, like every other preference.
Size and face are written into a style element rather than the
stylesheet: ::cue takes no custom properties, so the values have to be
literal.
Placement is not a CSS property at all — WebVTT carries position on the
cue — so it is rewritten into the cues themselves and the track re-cut.
Every source is text now, including the sidecars beside older
downloads, so all three can be placed the same way.
The default lands at 85%, between WebKit's own size and the 58% that
replaced it.
Re-cutting a track exposed a bug in the guard that applies the
subtitle preference: it keyed on how many text tracks there were, and
re-cutting one leaves that unchanged, so the fresh track would have
stayed disabled and the subtitles would have vanished on any change of
Place. It keys on the tracks themselves.
The captions were pinned to one side and set for a television across a
room. Verified fixed in the running app: centred at the bottom of the
picture, smaller, on a translucent ground instead of solid black.
The position was not in the file — the embedded track extracts to
WebVTT with no cue settings at all. It was the element's in-band
rendering: WebKit hands a container's own subtitle stream to the media
pipeline, which places it wherever the container's text box points and
which no CSS can reach.
So the player reads the stream out of the file with ffmpeg — about
40ms, no re-encoding — and attaches it as an ordinary track. The
download stays one self-contained file; the cues become ours to place
and style. The file's own track is filtered out of the menu and left
disabled, or the same captions would be offered twice and the in-band
copy would render underneath.
Cue styling: 58% of WebKit's default size, on slate at 55% rather than
opaque black.
Verified in the running app and against the files on disk.
Subtitles are muxed into the download as a soft SubRip track rather
than written beside it. Without --write-subs, yt-dlp fetches them,
embeds them and removes the WebVTT, so a download is one file — checked
with ffprobe: video, audio, one mov_text track, no sidecar. WebKit
exposes it, so the player lists and shows it with no fetch at all,
which also means it works offline.
They are converted to SubRip on the way in. YouTube's WebVTT pins every
cue to the left edge and fills it with karaoke timing tags; the first
embed carried both and rendered clamped to the side of the picture.
SubRip carries neither. Only the plain language is embedded — "en" and
"en-orig" are usually the same captions, and nothing can collapse
duplicates once they are muxed in.
Downloads left unfinished when the app closes are picked up on the next
launch, at the quality and language they were asked for, which the
downloads table now records. Verified by leaving a row "running" with
no process behind it and restarting: it downloaded and completed.
The player's track menu is subtitles only — the audio renditions are
gone, the original-audio default still being fixed in the manifest —
and tracks read "English" rather than "en".
Turning subtitles off in one video now sticks for the next. The guard
that applies the preference keyed on the number of text tracks alone,
which does not change from one video to the next, so a choice of Off
was never re-applied; it keys on the video as well.
Embedding no longer depends on the on/off preference, the same trap
that kept fetching switched off: a file downloaded without a subtitle
track can never gain one offline.
Delete all is a trash icon.
Verified in the running app: captions render on a downloaded video and
on a stream, and the player's menu lists them under SUBTITLES beside
AUDIO.
Three things were wrong.
The preference decided whether subtitles were fetched at all, so "Off"
— the old default, which nobody had to choose — silently emptied the
subtitle menu as well. Fetching now happens regardless; the preference
only says which language switches itself on.
Choosing a track from the menu moved the preference from "off" to that
language, which re-ran the fetch, tore down the tracks and stalled the
stream mid-play. The fetch keys on the language it would ask for, not
on the preference, and that value does not change when "off" becomes
the language it already stood for.
The preference was re-applied on every poll of the track list, so a
choice made in the menu was undone a second later. It now applies once
per set of tracks, which also makes "Off" mean off.
Anyone still carrying the old "off" default is moved to English once.
An Off chosen deliberately after this is left alone.
YouTube's HLS manifest carries a dozen audio renditions and no
subtitles whatsoever — checked against a live master playlist: 16
EXT-X-MEDIA entries, all TYPE=AUDIO, zero SUBTITLES. So the track menu
could only ever list audio while streaming, which is what it did.
Subtitles are now fetched separately with yt-dlp, tidied through the
existing VTT cleanup, and cached per video and language. They reach the
player as blob URLs, which share the document's origin — a file:// or
127.0.0.1 track would be cross-origin to the page and need CORS the
media pipeline cannot supply. The same path fills in a download saved
before subtitles were switched on, without fetching the video again.
YouTube serves identical auto-generated captions under both "en" and
"en-orig", so byte-identical texts collapse to one entry rather than
offering the same track twice, and tracks are labelled "English"
rather than "en".
The subtitle preference now defaults to English. "None" is a poor
default for a setting whose whole purpose is captions: it silently
means no subtitles are downloaded, fetched, or offered anywhere, and
the Settings text now says so.
List and Tiles are now icons rather than words, centred in their
buttons — Segmented takes a ReactNode label and an optional title.
The red "N failing" count in the sidebar is a button: click it to see
only the channels that failed to refresh, click again for all of them.
It clears itself once a refresh fixes everything, so the filter can
never strand you on an empty list.
The player states its quality as a badge instead of loose grey text,
and a downloaded video now says so too — "Downloaded · 1440p" — read
from the file itself. Quality is the short side, so a portrait Short
reads 1080p rather than 1920p, and it resets between videos so one
never inherits the previous one's number.
Failing channels are visible instead of buried in a toast count. Each
refresh records its outcome per channel, the sidebar marks the failures
and counts them in its heading, and selecting one explains why above its
videos. Yours turn out to be three channels returning HTTP 404 — removed
or renamed on YouTube.
Video lengths now fill for what is on screen. Filling the newest across
all subscriptions meant a channel's videos stayed blank forever, since
the global newest always won the queue.
yt-dlp can be updated from Settings, which also says whether it is
current. It breaks whenever YouTube changes something, so it lands in
app data and takes precedence over the bundled copy; ffmpeg is stable
and ships with each release, so it is shown but not updated.
Also: 'Downloaded only' is now 'Local'; Hide Shorts moved to Settings;
the seven-step Takeout guide moved behind a button, since it dominated
the panel; the player names the height it is actually streaming, which
changes as an adaptive stream switches rendition; the player's delete is
an icon; and the window minimum drops to 1080 now that the control row
has one fewer button, while still never wrapping.
Subtitles rendered pinned to the left edge and clipped, in half-grey
karaoke text: YouTube's auto-captions carry align:start position:0% on
every cue plus inline <00:00:12.480><c>word</c> timing tags. Both are
now stripped after download, and existing downloads are tidied the first
time they are listed.
Thumbnails show video length. The Atom feed carries no duration, so it
is read from the watch page and cached — but only a trickle. The first
version fetched 24 pages every 12 seconds at six concurrent, roughly two
requests a second sustained, and YouTube answered by challenging the
whole IP: 'Sign in to confirm you are not a bot', which broke streaming
and downloads too. It is now four pages every five minutes, one at a
time, and stops for the session the moment a batch is refused.
A subtitle chosen in the player becomes the stored preference, so the
next video matches without going back to Settings.
The back and download buttons are square icon buttons; the back glyph
was off-centre because px-2 beat the p-0 meant to clear it.
Subtitles: a language preference in Settings drives what is shown and
what is downloaded. yt-dlp saves WebVTT sidecars next to each download,
including YouTube's auto-generated track, and the player attaches them
as <track> elements so they work offline. Sidecars are removed with
their video, and by Delete all.
WebVTT rather than muxed subtitle streams because WebKit reads a <track>
reliably and largely ignores subtitle tracks inside an MP4.
Downloads in progress now appear under the downloaded-only filter, so a
download you just started does not vanish from the list you are watching
it in. That view also gains a Delete all, behind a confirmation naming
what goes.
The feed refreshes on launch and whenever the player closes, so the
Refresh button is only for staleness.
Player: Delete moved to the footer and shortened, Open on YouTube is now
an external-link icon.
Removes the Edit and Help menus. Cut/Copy/Paste move to the app menu,
without which their shortcuts would stop working in the search field.
The webview context menu is suppressed outside text fields — its Reload
and Back items act on a page the app does not present as one.
Settings now warns that 4K AV1 plays back with artefacts: the files
decode cleanly in ffmpeg, so it is the built-in decoder, not the
download.
YouTube marks an AI-dubbed audio track DEFAULT=YES on some videos and
AVFoundation obeys the manifest, so a synthetic voice played over the
original. The app now always serves its own rewritten master playlist —
previously only when a quality cap was set — and marks the track whose
language matches the video's own as the default, falling back to
whichever track does not describe itself as dubbed. Every track is still
listed, so switching remains possible.
Adds an audio and subtitle picker to the transport bar, reading the
video element's audioTracks and textTracks. Subtitles start off for the
same reason the dub does: nothing translated is forced on.
Also collapses the player's own title-bar strip in window fullscreen,
which was leaving a stray bar above the player header.
Every control in the app now shares one height (CONTROL_H), with width
still growing to fit its label. The player transport is larger, Back is
an icon, and the footer buttons match the prev/next size.
Player chrome — transport and edge arrows — fades after 2.6s of
inactivity and never hides while paused.
The title-bar strip collapses in macOS window fullscreen, where the
traffic lights are gone and it was just a blank white bar.
Streaming quality is now selectable alongside download quality. A cap is
applied by rewriting YouTube's HLS master playlist down to the best
variant at or below the chosen height, keeping its audio group. That
playlist is served from a small loopback HTTP server: Safari's native
HLS is backed by AVFoundation, which cannot read blob: or custom-scheme
URLs, so a Blob URL silently fails to play.
Settings closes with an icon button and its selects match the shared
control height.
Replace WebKit's native video controls with our own. WebKit puts
fullscreen, Picture-in-Picture and volume as overlay buttons in the
video's top corners with no way to move them; owning the bar is the only
way to get every control into one strip along the bottom. Right-click on
the player is suppressed — its menu acted on a video the app does not
control.
One spinner now covers both waits: resolving the stream URL and
buffering it. It no longer sticks after a resume-seek, which fires
'waiting' after 'playing'.
Also: Open on YouTube and a new Download are real buttons in the player;
refresh is a compact icon; Settings is a cog; the subscription sidebar
collapses and reappears on a left-edge hover; the feed auto-refreshes
every 10 minutes while online, skipped while the player is open; the
title-bar strip takes the panel colour, since it sits above panels
rather than the page; and downloaded-only, hide-Shorts and the sidebar
state are remembered between launches.
Enable WKWebView's elementFullscreenEnabled at startup. It is off by
default in a Tauri window, which is why the native player had no
full-screen button and why right-click 'Enter Full Screen' did nothing.
With it on, WebKit's own control appears on the video and gives the real
system fullscreen player, so the app-level workaround is gone.
Restore window dragging: data-tauri-drag-region needs
core:window:allow-start-dragging, which was missing, leaving the
title-bar strip inert.
Download quality is now a resolution picker (best/2160/1440/1080/720/
480) instead of a two-way toggle; every selector still pins AAC audio
because Opus in MP4 is silent in WebKit.
Tile titles truncate to a single line so rows stay uniform, and the
player shows a spinner while the video buffers, not just while the
stream URL resolves.
The full-screen button did nothing: WKWebView inside a Tauri window has
element fullscreen disabled outright, so both requestFullscreen() and
WebKit's webkitEnterFullscreen() are inert, and Tauri exposes no switch
for it. Fullscreening the window alone is not the same thing either —
the player's header and footer stay on screen around the picture. The
button now fullscreens the window and hides every piece of chrome, so
the video alone fills the display, with Esc and a hover control to exit.
Prev/next also get large arrows on the left and right edges of the
picture, fading in on hover, alongside the header buttons.
Window chrome: titleBarStyle Overlay (Transparent left the native bar in
place, white in dark mode, with a dead strip beneath it). The app now
paints that strip itself, so it matches the page background.
Player: prev/next through the feed, a full-screen button, a spinner
while a stream resolves, Open on YouTube on downloaded videos too, and
the description collapsed behind a disclosure.
Downloads default to Best, which reaches real 4K — above 1080p YouTube
serves VP9/AV1, verified to play natively in WKWebView here. Audio stays
pinned to AAC because Opus in MP4 would be silent. A Compatible setting
keeps the old 1080p H.264 behaviour. Files are now named
'<ISO date> - <title> [<id>].mp4'.
Watch progress is recorded and drawn under thumbnails like YouTube's,
and reopening a video resumes where it left off.
Tiles clamp every text line to a fixed height so they share a baseline,
and the search field no longer clips its placeholder.
Fixes a Picture-in-Picture leak: WebKit kept a detached video playing
after the player closed, so a second video could play over the first
with no way to stop it. Every exit path now tears the element down.
Clicking an undownloaded video now plays it in the app instead of
handing off to the browser. YouTube's iframe embed cannot be used —
it rejects a tauri:// origin with Error 153 — so yt-dlp resolves
YouTube's HLS master playlist instead, whose H.264+AAC variants
AVFoundation streams natively in WKWebView, adaptive up to 1080p.
Adds an optional Tiles view alongside the list, remembered between
launches.
The title bar is now transparent with the title hidden, and the app
paints that strip itself in the page background so it matches instead
of showing macOS chrome beside the traffic lights.
Adds a seven-step in-app guide to exporting subscriptions from Google
Takeout, with the real URLs opened in the system browser.
Restyles the app onto the supplied design system: slate/sky palette,
9-15px type ladder, outline-first controls, tiered radii, borders for
separation and shadows only for elevation. Light and dark are both
designed, with a System/Light/Dark control and a pre-paint script so
the window does not flash light on a dark machine.
Importing now replaces the subscription list rather than merging, per
request. Because that can delete downloaded files, a confirmation
dialog names exactly what will go first.
ffmpeg only accepts -version (single dash); it exits 8 on --version and
writes to stderr, so the status panel reported it missing even when
installed. Version flags are now per-tool and both streams are read.
The player used max-h-full inside a grid, which a 1080x1920 Short
overflowed. Switched to absolute fill with object-contain so portrait
and landscape both letterbox correctly.
Also sized the window to 1180x780 centered, which fits a laptop display.
Adds an end-to-end integration test that runs the real pipeline against
live YouTube Atom feeds, verifying the merged feed is newest-first
across channels.
vincent