One fixed size cannot suit everyone — the default was too big, then
too small. The subtitle menu in the transport bar now carries an
Appearance section: Size (S/M/L/XL), Font (Sans/Serif/Mono) and Place
(Bottom/Raised/Top). Choices apply at once and are remembered across
videos and launches, like every other preference.
Size and face are written into a style element rather than the
stylesheet: ::cue takes no custom properties, so the values have to be
literal.
Placement is not a CSS property at all — WebVTT carries position on the
cue — so it is rewritten into the cues themselves and the track re-cut.
Every source is text now, including the sidecars beside older
downloads, so all three can be placed the same way.
The default lands at 85%, between WebKit's own size and the 58% that
replaced it.
Re-cutting a track exposed a bug in the guard that applies the
subtitle preference: it keyed on how many text tracks there were, and
re-cutting one leaves that unchanged, so the fresh track would have
stayed disabled and the subtitles would have vanished on any change of
Place. It keys on the tracks themselves.
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.
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.
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