Unnamed Youtube Frontend

Contributors wanted! Please send me an email (see commit log) or message girst on irc.libera.chat/#invidious

Test Instance: https://subscriptions.gir.st/

Installation

see INSTALL file

Features

• subscribe to channels and playlists
• raw video/audio mode (downloadable)
• automatically skips over sponsored video segments (javascript required)
• proxies georestricted videos
• subreddit viewer
• extremely leight weight: requires << 100MB RAM or disk space (multi-user test instance runs on bottom-of-the-barrel 10$/y VPS)

Non-Features

• no algorithmically determined video recommendations: Find additional content through Youtube search, endcards or Reddit
• no youtube comments

TODOs

If you can program in Python or know HTML/CSS, get in touch!

important/big features

• Find a recognizable/googleable/duckable name
  send suggestions!
• 1080p support
  Problem: must mux video and audio streams client side; requiring javascript (non-MediaSource solution to avoid CORS)
• /watch endpoint should allow continue playing playlist (&list=PL...&index=x)
• support for autogenerated channels
  Problem: require different protobuf structures; cannot differentiate from normal channels
  Samples: UCbqBqmG-EXTUsp2v4SHGDRg, UCuVPpxrm2VAgpH3Ktln4HXg, UClgRkhTL3_hImCAmdLfDE4g

users' wishlist

• Tag javascripts with LibreJS
  Problem: SPDX not supported; LibreJS doesn't define a AGPLv3-only identifier
• allow proxying all thumbnails/googlevideo URLs
  Note: should be disableable in the config; only touching proxy/ blueprint

internal stuff

• moar internal and public documentation
• when get_video_info returns a 403ing video url, remove from cache and retry
  Problem: requires an additional HEAD to googlevideo.com; must check
• immediately subscribe
  asynchronically call update-subs and pull-subs on subscribing, iff necessary
• remove deleted videos from subscription feed
  Note: when a deletion websub comes in, check with get_video_info
  Note: for livestreams, check postlivedvr and queue deletion after it ended
• cleanups:
  • split up common/common.py; move stuff into plugins
  • abstract database access
  • proper task queue for refesh-cipher, pull-subs, update-websub
  • fix all TODOs/XXXs
  • welcome message: maybe make dismissable, show on all pages?

Advanced Topics

Extending Unnamed Youtube Frontend

UYtF is trivially extensible using Flask Blueprints. Just drop a new blueprint in app/ and register it in the [frontend]modules section of config.ini. The Blueprint inside a module is expected to be named frontend. An example_blueprint is provided, which shows off how to use fallback_route and fetching the user token on guest-accessible routes.

The default youtube blueprint provides unblockable but minimal versions of the /channel and /playlist endpoints. A custom blueprint (or, as an example, the browse blueprint) can overwrite existing routes by being listed before the one to be overridden in config.ini. A blueprint may also delegate a request to another (lower precedence) blueprint using return fallback_route(*args, **kwargs). This can be useful if the endpoint might not be as reliable.

Proxying videos

This is useful to watch videos that are IP-locked. add the proxy blueprint to the [frontend]modules list in config.ini to enable (disabled by default, as it is resource-intensive, blocks a gunicorn thread and hasn't been tested w.r.t. googlebanning).

Guest User

The guest user doesn't really exist; you can't log in as guest, and all guest views are read-only. To modify the shown subscription feed, you'll have to modify the database manually. To add a single channel, issuing INSERT INTO subscriptions (user, channel_id) VALUES ("guest", "UC..."). To load many at once, prepare a file (guest.csv) of channel ids that looks like this:

UCxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,guest,channel

Then from the sqlite3 console, issue: .mode csv .import guest.csv subscriptions

Running modules on different Hosts

The webhooks and proxy modules support being ran standalone on a different machine. For this, remove them from config.ini's [frontend]modules and start them using gunicorn by replacing app:app with (e.g.) app.webhooks:app() (the parenthesis are required, as those use the factory pattern to not uselessly instantiate the Flask app object if it wouldn't be needed). An example is given in config/subscriptions-webhooks.service.

Note that the proxy endpoint can't reliably access ip-restricted streams if its IP is different to the frontend's.

Functional Overview

rough functional overview diagram

License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3.

A copy of hls.js is included; it is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

A modified copy of python-protobuf is included; it is available under the MIT License.