Replaces the official yt-dlp_macos sidecar. That build is PyInstaller
one-file and unpacks 37MB on every invocation, costing ~8s per call on
this machine — ruled out signing, xattrs and thinning the universal
binary as causes, and it is 8% CPU over 8s, so it is the unpack itself.
Every stream resolve paid it.
The 3MB zipapp on a trimmed portable CPython starts in ~0.45s, a 17x
improvement; a real stream resolve goes from ~10s to ~2.4s. macOS ships
only Python 3.9 and yt-dlp needs 3.10+, hence bundling an interpreter.
yt-dlp is now resolved as an argv prefix rather than a path, so a system
install (a plain script, instant) still takes precedence.
Bundle grows 153MB -> 219MB, which buys back the responsiveness.
The bundled yt-dlp is a PyInstaller one-file binary that unpacks ~37MB
on every invocation, costing about eight seconds a call on this machine
regardless of signing, xattrs or thinning the universal binary. Homebrew's
copy is a Python script and starts instantly, so bundling traded startup
speed for self-containment.
Softens it where possible: tool versions are read once at startup in the
background rather than on every Settings open, and resolved stream URLs
are cached for three hours (well inside YouTube's signed-URL lifetime) so
replaying a video costs nothing. A first play still pays the startup.
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.
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.
Deleting a download removed the database row but left its entry in the
live-progress map, so the row kept showing Saved and an Offline badge
until the app restarted.
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.
Refresh fetches 8 channel feeds concurrently and mirrors thumbnails to
disk so the offline feed still renders. Downloads are capped at 2 and
shell out to yt-dlp with an absolute binary path, since GUI apps do not
inherit a login shell PATH.
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.
Offline-first YouTube subscription feed reader: Takeout CSV import,
public Atom feeds for metadata, yt-dlp downloads constrained to
H.264/AAC for in-app WKWebView playback.
vincent