Simple, Minimal YouTube Client | Submission for High Seas
This is a YouTube viewer without a lot of the features that YouTube puts on top; this leads to a much less laggy experience, while keeping yourself pseudo-anonymous (see below).
I say "pseudo-anonymous" because the embed goes through a different YouTube embed URL: "youtube-nocookie" and therefore cookies are obviously not transferred from youtube.com. Which means your account is not associated with what you're watching. However, this is not as anonymous as something like the server sending you the raw video through a custom player which would incur much more egress and possible delay for the viewer.
I made this for High Seas but I also made this because the YouTube client was pretty laggy for my device, but alternative clients like Invidious had unfavorable delays because the video goes through the server and I was personally fine with the YouTube player but the client itself was kind of laggy.
This is a compromise of both: an alternative client with much less lag, while keeping the official YouTube player.
- Your account is NOT associated with your searches or views!
- You don't get any ads, even without an ad-blocker.
- Livestreaming works beautifully
- Much less on-load lag than the main YouTube website
- People hosting don't need to worry about data usage since YouTube embedding is used.
- catppuccin :D
You can use the official demo link:
https://barex.doxr.hackclub.app/
This uses:
node (Node.js) + npm
youtubei (not youtubei.js) - NPM Dependency
express - NPM Dependency
Start by cloning the repo. Ensure you have git, Node.js, and npm (should come with Node.js) installed!
git clone https://github.com/DoxrGitHub/hs-yt.git
Then enter it and install npm dependencies.
cd hs-yt; npm install
If you want to save a little bit of space you can run rm -rf backup
Finally, run
node main.js 3000
You can replace 3000 with your preferred port. On subsequent installs you can just enter the hs-yt directory and run the above command.
You may need to set up https/SSL through a reverse proxy or something
I may add:
- Better Shorts Support (unlikely)
- Better "More Videos"
- Integrated video downloading instead of redirection to a different project
- "Load More Search Results" button
- Better Mobile Support (sorry!)
- Channel Page Support
Doxr: development
Invidious instances: main trending page API
youtubei* - a lot of internal YouTube interactions
If you see package.json, I use a custom version of youtubei, because at the time I found it, it was giving errors. However, I patched some of them and put it on a repo. If it gets fixed I'll replace it with the official npm module. I stuck with youtubei because it used the InnerTube API directly and the server response didn't give me bot errors like it did with youtubei.js, for whatever reason.