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.
Two faults behind the 429 in the report.
The subtitle languages were a wildcard: 'en.*' also matches every
machine-translated variant YouTube offers — en-en-US and dozens more —
so each download fired a burst of subtitle requests and earned an HTTP
429. Languages are now named exactly, as '<lang>,<lang>-orig'. Turning
subtitles off now really does request none; it previously still asked
for English.
Worse, yt-dlp exits non-zero if anything at all failed, and a caption it
could not fetch was enough to mark a fully downloaded video as failed
and leave the file orphaned. yt-dlp now runs with --ignore-errors, and
success is judged by whether the media file actually landed rather than
by the exit code.
429 also gets its own message pointing at the sign-in setting, which
raises the limit.
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.
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.
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.
37 unit tests covering the three parsers and the database, including
that a feed refresh preserves download state and that a truncated
feed response fails rather than storing partial results.
vincent