FlightTube

A desktop app that merges all your YouTube subscriptions into one newest-first feed, downloads the videos you pick, and — when you have no connection — shows only what you already downloaded. Built for the flight.

Tauri 2 · Rust · React · Tailwind CSS 4 · SQLite

How it works

Subscriptions come from Google Takeout, not the API. Export YouTube subscriptions from Takeout and import the subscriptions.csv in Settings. No OAuth, no API key, no Google Cloud project, nothing secret on disk.

Video metadata comes from YouTube's public Atom feed — one request per channel to youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=…, fetched 8 at a time and merged into a single feed sorted by publish date. Thumbnails are mirrored to local disk so the feed still renders with no network.

Downloads shell out to yt-dlp, pinned to H.264 video + AAC audio in an MP4 container. That caps quality at 1080p — YouTube only serves H.264 that high, and anything above it is VP9 or AV1, which the app's own player cannot reliably decode. The tradeoff is deliberate: every download is guaranteed to play inside FlightTube.

Requirements

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

Both are checked at startup; Settings shows their versions and this command if either is missing. ffmpeg is required because best-quality H.264 and AAC arrive as separate streams that must be merged.

Running it

npm install && npm run tauri dev

Build a real app bundle:

npm run tauri build

Using it

1. Settings → Import subscriptions.csv — point it at your Takeout export.
2. Refresh — pulls the latest videos from every channel.
3. Download on any video — progress shows live on the button; click again to cancel.
4. Click a downloaded video to play it in the app. Click an undownloaded one to open it on YouTube.
5. Offline — the app detects a lost connection and collapses the feed to your downloads. The connectivity pill also toggles a forced offline mode for testing.

Videos land in ~/Movies/FlightTube (changeable in Settings).

Limitations

• The Atom feed returns only the ~15 most recent videos per channel. There is no backfill and no pagination — this is a rolling recent window, not an archive.
• Quality tops out at 1080p, by the deliberate choice described above.
• yt-dlp needs occasional updating (brew upgrade yt-dlp) as YouTube changes.
• Downloading videos is contrary to YouTube's Terms of Service.

Tests

cd src-tauri && cargo test

37 unit tests cover the three places malformed input actually bites: Takeout CSV parsing, Atom feed parsing (against a captured real response), and yt-dlp progress-line parsing — plus the database rule that a refresh must never clobber download state.

Two network-dependent tests are excluded by default:

cargo test --test pipeline -- --ignored --nocapture      # full pipeline vs. live feeds
cargo test --test seed_real_db -- --ignored --nocapture  # populate the installed app's db

Layout

src-tauri/src/
  takeout.rs     subscriptions.csv -> channels        (pure, tested)
  feed.rs        Atom XML -> videos, plus fetching    (parse is pure, tested)
  downloader.rs  yt-dlp arguments and progress lines  (pure, tested)
  db.rs          schema and every SQL statement
  thumbs.rs      local thumbnail cache
  net.rs         reachability probe
  commands.rs    Tauri command surface — delegates only
src/
  components/    Sidebar, TopBar, VideoRow, DownloadButton, Player, Settings
  hooks/         useFeed, useDownloads, useConnectivity

Design notes and the implementation plan are in docs/superpowers/.