New application for YouTube

[Dronecatcher]

I have been using this UA recently: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_1_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0 Mobile/16D57 Safari/605.1.15

I go to Youtube, nothing plays (which is good), cut and paste the url to the video I want, paste that link into one of the online video downloaders, then watch in VLC. With only VLC running, plus Activity Monitor. CPU usage was bouncing between 34% and 45%. The video was 360P mp4. PowerBook G4 1.67.

Downloading and playing is always going to save cycles but the browser options just allow you to click and play immediately.
Using youtube-dl or a download plugin plus Coreplayer/Mplayer will get you down to around 30% for 360P.

 

[sawpits]

Downloading and playing is always going to save cycles but the browser options just allow you to click and play immediately.
Using youtube-dl or a download plugin plus Coreplayer/Mplayer will get you down to around 30% for 360P.

I find this method easier, plus I save videos to watch later.

 

[Dronecatcher]

I'm just happy that 3gp playback is on the table again - it stopped working for me a couple of years ago because of ISP interference, now I've even got instant playback on my G3 iBook 🙂

 

[Dronecatcher]

Any progress on this project?

 

[aandreyy]

Any progress on this project?

Yes! Just don't have any fancy screenshots or exciting news to share.

I've been working on a player interface and optimization of playback backend, but the more I learn about it, the deeper I stuck. Right now my powerbook is busy compiling a G4-optimized FFMpeg decoder for MP4. Before that I had to spend a weekend to modify and build Clang 3.8 for 10.5 (gcc not supported by ffmpeg). Should have start from player stuff in the first place...

Don't want the app to be just an interface for youtube-dl, so have to go low level to achieve decent playback performance too.

 

[Traace]

Yes! Just don't have any fancy screenshots or exciting news to share.

I've been working on a player interface and optimization of playback backend, but the more I learn about it, the deeper I stuck. Right now my powerbook is busy compiling a G4-optimized FFMpeg decoder for MP4. Before that I had to spend a weekend to modify and build Clang 3.8 for 10.5 (gcc not supported by ffmpeg). Should have start from player stuff in the first place...

Don't want the app to be just an interface for youtube-dl, so have to go low level to achieve decent playback performance too.

strange, i can build ffmpeg with gcc6 and a few patches just fine on my ppc...
http://ppcports.fopnu.pw:8844/ffmpeg/

 

[Dronecatcher]

Any news on your project @aandreyy ?

 

[cellularmitosis]

@aandreyy was this ever open-sourced? I'm starting down the same rabbit hole myself.

 

[ocmac]

@aandreyy was this ever open-sourced? I'm starting down the same rabbit hole myself.

Always had the impression he was Russian. aandreyy. Not sure, his full profile is not viewable. If Russian he may have been one of the 700,000 military aged males, many of them IT and other "tech" people who fled Mother Russia and are in exile. Or, he may have been called up and is in a trench, or in a shallow grave in Ukraine.

There are many still viable PPC youtube techniques (search subject and look for posts from Dronecatcher and Wicknix), I of course applaud you going down the rabbit hole, but maybe look at taking one of the existing techniques and work on improving playback? Dronecatcher's techniques in particular still work marvels on even lowend machines running Tiger.

Speaking of Russians, the vip.2yxa.mobi site is still working despite war and sanctions, I can download and playback almost anything I want off youtube from there. Tenfivetube and Tensixtube by Wicknix are still working absolutely fine for me on my lowend intels and PPC.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Speaking of Russians, the vip.2yxa.mobi site is still working despite war and sanctions

Alas, they no longer have the PayPal payment option though 🙁

 

[cellularmitosis]

but maybe look at taking one of the existing techniques and work on improving playback?

Well, here's where I'm at so far:

There's a guy who famously reverse engineered YouTube's private API years ago and implemented a client in C#

• https://tyrrrz.me/blog/reverse-engineering-youtube-revisited
• https://github.com/Tyrrrz/YoutubeExplode

I don't really know C#, but I learned enough of it to make synchronous equivalents of all of his async functions, which makes it compatible with the pythonnet C#-to-Python interface:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/YoutubeExplodeSync

I then wrote a REST API in Python WSGI around that:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/yte.wsgi.py

This will run on a linux box on your local LAN and act as a YouTube API and realtime video transcoder.

So at this point I just need to write a Cocoa desktop app which acts as a client for the API and launches MPlayer (or maybe have the API stream RTSP to QuickTime).

I have about four years of Objective-C experience, but that was back before I switched to Swift in 2015, so I'm having to dust off some cobwebs there. Also, AppKit is quite a bit different than UIKit (I'm an iPhone developer, not a Mac developer), so there's definitely a learning curve.

However, I have started watching the WWDC videos from the 2000 to 2004 era:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/leopard.sh/blob/main/misc/dev.md#wwdc

and I've found that though Apple has taken all of their old ADC Reference Library sample code offline, they are still available via the old Apple Developer Connection DVD sets:

• https://www.macintoshrepository.org/software_search.php?s=apple+developer+connection&sid=&p=1

I uploaded the last copy of the ADC library which was Leopard-specific to github so that the source of the sample projects is browseable:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/ADC-reference-library-2009-july

and made the HTML browseable via github.io at:

• http://leopard-adc.pepas.com/

So I think I'll probably have something working in maybe four more weekends.

 

[ocmac]

Well, here's where I'm at so far:

There's a guy who famously reverse engineered YouTube's private API years ago and implemented a client in C#

• https://tyrrrz.me/blog/reverse-engineering-youtube-revisited
• https://github.com/Tyrrrz/YoutubeExplode

I don't really know C#, but I learned enough of it to make synchronous equivalents of all of his async functions, which makes it compatible with the pythonnet C#-to-Python interface:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/YoutubeExplodeSync

I then wrote a REST API in Python WSGI around that:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/yte.wsgi.py

This will run on a linux box on your local LAN and act as a YouTube API and realtime video transcoder.

So at this point I just need to write a Cocoa desktop app which acts as a client for the API and launches MPlayer (or maybe have the API stream RTSP to QuickTime).

I have about four years of Objective-C experience, but that was back before I switched to Swift in 2015, so I'm having to dust off some cobwebs there. Also, AppKit is quite a bit different than UIKit (I'm an iPhone developer, not a Mac developer), so there's definitely a learning curve.

However, I have started watching the WWDC videos from the 2000 to 2004 era:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/leopard.sh/blob/main/misc/dev.md#wwdc

and I've found that though Apple has taken all of their old ADC Reference Library sample code offline, they are still available via the old Apple Developer Connection DVD sets:

• https://www.macintoshrepository.org/software_search.php?s=apple+developer+connection&sid=&p=1

I uploaded the last copy of the ADC library which was Leopard-specific to github so that the source of the sample projects is browseable:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/ADC-reference-library-2009-july

and made the HTML browseable via github.io at:

• http://leopard-adc.pepas.com/

So I think I'll probably have something working in maybe four more weekends.

You seem to have legit programming skills, unlike many who say they are going to, i dunno, build a brand new modern standards compliant Mac OS 9 browser from scratch using only fishing line and Codewarrior. Much more than I can say. It's a struggle for me to write an AppleScript. My hopes and prayers are with you for the next four weekends!

 

[crimsonRE]

Well, here's where I'm at so far:

There's a guy who famously reverse engineered YouTube's private API years ago and implemented a client in C#

• https://tyrrrz.me/blog/reverse-engineering-youtube-revisited
• https://github.com/Tyrrrz/YoutubeExplode

I don't really know C#, but I learned enough of it to make synchronous equivalents of all of his async functions, which makes it compatible with the pythonnet C#-to-Python interface:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/YoutubeExplodeSync

I then wrote a REST API in Python WSGI around that:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/yte.wsgi.py

This will run on a linux box on your local LAN and act as a YouTube API and realtime video transcoder.

So at this point I just need to write a Cocoa desktop app which acts as a client for the API and launches MPlayer (or maybe have the API stream RTSP to QuickTime).

I have about four years of Objective-C experience, but that was back before I switched to Swift in 2015, so I'm having to dust off some cobwebs there. Also, AppKit is quite a bit different than UIKit (I'm an iPhone developer, not a Mac developer), so there's definitely a learning curve.

However, I have started watching the WWDC videos from the 2000 to 2004 era:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/leopard.sh/blob/main/misc/dev.md#wwdc

and I've found that though Apple has taken all of their old ADC Reference Library sample code offline, they are still available via the old Apple Developer Connection DVD sets:

• https://www.macintoshrepository.org/software_search.php?s=apple+developer+connection&sid=&p=1

I uploaded the last copy of the ADC library which was Leopard-specific to github so that the source of the sample projects is browseable:

• https://github.com/cellularmitosis/ADC-reference-library-2009-july

and made the HTML browseable via github.io at:

• http://leopard-adc.pepas.com/

So I think I'll probably have something working in maybe four more weekends.

Super nice of you to extract all this and make it available to us!