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