Remove all sits beside Import in Settings, since emptying the list is
the other half of replacing it. It asks first and counts what goes:
210 channels, 3339 videos, 50 downloaded files, in those words. Nothing
changes on YouTube, and the confirmation says so — importing or reading
the list again brings it all back.
It takes the same path an import does when nothing survives, so a video
saved on its own from the menu bar is left alone: its channel was never
a subscription, and this is about subscriptions.
The app also reopens whatever was playing when it last closed, if that
video is still in the feed and still playable — offline, one that was
streaming is not. The note is made while the player is open and dropped
when it is closed, so a restart only reopens something you were in the
middle of, never something you had deliberately finished with. Verified
both ways: quitting mid-video came back to it, closing the player first
came back to the feed.
The panel's Remove all downloads is gone; it was a misreading of the
request.
Takeout is a snapshot you have to go and fetch. This reads the live list
from youtube.com/feed/channels in a browser already signed in.
It runs JavaScript in the page rather than fetching it here, because
the session cannot be borrowed: Chromium encrypts its cookie store with
a per-app Keychain key, and Arc's cookies read with Chrome's key came
back undecryptable — 1346 of 2196, the session cookies among them. The
list is also lazily loaded, so it has to be scrolled to the end, which
only the page can do. Measured against a hand-scrolled count: 208 both
ways.
The browser is brought to the front first. A background tab has its DOM
discarded, so it reports its address while having nothing on it, which
reads exactly like an empty subscription list.
The page gives handles, not channel ids. Most belong to channels already
known here and are matched by name, costing nothing; only the rest are
looked up, four at a time. That mattered more than it sounds: with the
name selector wrong every name came back empty, nothing matched, all 208
were looked up blind, and the result claimed 58 channels should be
deleted. With names read correctly it is 4 lookups and 0 deletions.
Names arriving doubled — "3D OCD 3D OCD", which reads fine and matches
nothing — are collapsed.
osascript prints a string result in source form, quoted with the
newlines escaped, so a list of rows arrived as one line that looked
like no rows at all. It is unquoted before parsing.
The menu bar item is now a window, not an NSMenu: the app's own type,
spacing and colours, hanging from the icon and closing on blur. Adding a
channel is gone from it — the sidebar already does that.
Replacing the subscription list is confirmed in the main window, never
in a panel that closes when you look away, and the confirmation counts
what would go before anything happens.
Verified end to end: 208 read, 4 looked up, 0 removed, 48 downloads
untouched.
Takeout is still the way a subscription list arrives. These are the
things it cannot do.
Hovering a channel in the sidebar reveals a delete, sitting where the
count is — the least useful thing on that row at the moment you reach
for it. It asks first, and says what goes: the channel, its videos, and
how many downloaded files will be deleted. It also says plainly that
YouTube is not touched; only this app forgets the channel.
A + beside the cog adds one channel from any link — its page, its
@handle, or one of its videos. The channel id and name are read off the
page, which is the same pair the CSV carries, and the feed is fetched
straight away so it is not sitting there empty.
A menu bar item acts on whatever a browser is showing without leaving
it: save that video, or subscribe to its channel, while it plays on.
The address comes from whichever running browser has a YouTube page —
asked with AppleScript, guarded so no browser is launched to answer,
and reported honestly when macOS has not granted the permission yet.
Answers come back as notifications rather than by raising the window.
Saving a video is not subscribing to its channel, so a channel can now
exist as a parent row without being a subscription: out of the sidebar,
skipped by refreshes, and left alone when a CSV import replaces the
subscription list.
Also removes a stale duplicate of the file header that had been sitting
inside run()'s setup block. Items are legal inside a block, so it
compiled and nobody noticed.
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.
A stop button appears beside Download all whenever anything is
downloading or waiting to, and disappears when nothing is. It kills the
running processes, marks everything the database still calls queued or
running as cancelled, and clears the part files. Downloads already
finished are untouched.
That also covers two cases a per-video Cancel cannot reach: a download
parked on a slot, which stands down when its turn comes, and a row left
"running" by a crash that no process backs any more.
Cancelling no longer reports itself as a failure. download_video
returned Err("Download was cancelled.") when it found its child gone,
which the caller turned into an error dialog — pressing Stop all would
have raised one per download. Stopping something is a normal outcome:
the state is already recorded and the event already sent, so it returns
cleanly.
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.
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.
Answers the bot challenge from inside the app. Settings gains a browser
picker listing only the browsers actually installed; choosing one passes
--cookies-from-browser to every yt-dlp call, so YouTube sees an
authenticated session. Verified against a live block: refused without
cookies, resolved with them.
Arc is Chromium underneath but is not one of yt-dlp's known names, so it
is addressed by its profile directory instead.
yt-dlp's errors are translated into something actionable. The stock bot
message points at command-line flags a user cannot type; it now names
the setting that fixes it, and Safari's protected cookie store gets its
own message about Full Disk Access rather than a bare 'Operation not
permitted'.
A Check connection button reports whether YouTube is reachable, testing
against the newest video in the feed — the hardcoded id it used at first
had been taken down, so it reported a dead video rather than the
connection.
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.
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.
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.
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 Rozenberg
vincent