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.
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.
The auto-refresh could throw you back to All subscriptions and then
refuse to let you back in. useFeed rebuilt reload() whenever the filter
changed, so a refresh started before you picked a channel still held
the old closure: half a minute later it re-fetched the unfiltered list
and overwrote yours. The sidebar still showed the channel as selected,
so clicking it changed nothing and there was no way back except via
another channel.
reload() now reads the filter at call time instead of capturing it, and
carries a sequence number so a slow reply cannot overwrite a newer one.
It is stable across filter changes, which also stops the auto-refresh
interval being torn down and restarted every time you click a channel.
Download all now works from All subscriptions too, capped by a new
Settings limit (default 25, up to no limit). It takes the newest first
and says what it did — "Queued the newest 25 of 500" — so a cap is
never silent. Press it again for the next batch.
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.
The control row wrapped to a second line as the window narrowed. It is
now flex-nowrap with only the search field giving up width, and the
window minimum is raised to 1140x620 so the fixed controls always fit
beside the sidebar on one line.
Also lands the 4K AV1 warning in Settings. The earlier attempt at this
silently changed nothing — the replacement text did not match the file,
so the copy shipped unchanged while being reported as done.
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.
The app is now self-contained: yt-dlp, ffmpeg and ffprobe ship inside
the bundle and are resolved beside the executable, so a fresh Mac needs
nothing installed. A system copy still wins when present, which is how
to run a newer yt-dlp than the bundled one. yt-dlp is pointed at the
bundled ffmpeg explicitly, since a bundled app has no reason to have one
on PATH.
The binaries stay out of git (~140MB); scripts/fetch-binaries.sh pulls
them. Homebrew's ffmpeg cannot be used — it links a dozen dylibs and
does not relocate — so the static arm64 build is used instead.
Version checks moved to the async Command. yt-dlp is a PyInstaller
bundle that unpacks ~37MB on first run, and the blocking call was
stalling a runtime worker for roughly twenty seconds.
Bundle size goes from 19MB to 153MB.
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.
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.
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