Comment by slazaro
7 months ago
I'd echo the sentiment that this is amazing, and that a TV guide would be awesome.
I'd also suggest maybe adding the channel names (like the comment you posted here) to the app itself (although i think it's cool when it's unnamed and you get the old-school feeling of channels just being numbers).
Also, I'd love to have permalinks for the channels. Not for the individual videos themselves, but just a link that when sharing would bring somebody else to the same channel you're watching right now.
Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono (since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left/right and it's super distracting), but it doesn't seem to work on this website, probably because of the way they're embedded. I don't know if this can be changed somehow, or have a mode to force mono audio (which would be also oldschool like old TVs with one speaker only!). It's probably too niche and hard to do though.
Also I don't seem to find any volume control except mute?
Before Netflix, there was Blockbuster. If we’re old enough, we remember going there and wandering through the aisles, trying to find something we would commit to. It was just as hard as picking something to watch today. There’s something incredibly important about not having the option and just going with the flow, which I think a lot of people won’t admit they like but actually do. It’s something truly missing from today’s society.
Actually, now that I think about it, I believe this is why TikTok succeeds so well, along with all the doom scrolling—it’s exactly like this. You don’t know what you’re going to get next. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t, and that’s okay. You’re just flipping through it.
> There’s something incredibly important about not having the option and just going with the flow, which I think a lot of people won’t admit they like but actually do.
Personally, I hate it. I can easily get glued to it and watch any random junk. And because it keeps going ad infinitum, I lost track of time and kept wasting my time, even if I was angry at how bad the program was.
With the internet, I always have to make a choice regarding what to watch next, and for every thing I pick the runtime is clearly visible. It helps me make conscious choices and figure out when to stop.
> It’s something truly missing from today’s society.
That feels like a stretch. TV still exists. And it’s mostly garbage.
I had youtube TV for a while and the most annoying thing is that there were no channel numbers.
That and the 50 other terrible design choices they made. What a hot mess youtube tv is.
The worst part is that it’s the best UI for its product segment by far, and I don’t think it’s even close.
The bar is incredibly low.
Compared to what? It's easily the best Internet cable TV product on the market IMHO.
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Their TV choices are confounding. I don’t know about other platforms, but the YouTube app on Apple TV is the most useless thing I’ve ever tried. Search is abysmal.
Interesting, This is apparently a TikTok-like scroller for youtube channel content, which they should have done natively many years ago...
I suspect they never did this because they never wanted to make YouTube compete directly with cable TV. YouTube content is displayed in a drab click-click UI because they want users to not scroll deeper for the content that isn't sponsored (paid) all the way to the front pages.
The UI of YouTube hasn't changed in essence for ages, it's still page based with only a few (shrinking) trending lists.
I think the reason they do that is because it allows them to control what is prominently displayed across YouTube -- The same concept is used across most social apps, where there are few features for discovering new content. The pages display embarrassing low view metrics on non-sponsored accounts, even when they may have really great content, it's really a backwards way of controlling what trends, and subsequently what makes money for the platform and sponsored creators.
If real choice was allowed on most of these platforms, we'd see literally endless (new) options for interesting new content on a wider variety of topics from creators none of us know, but right now, with shrinking choice, we only see manufactured and heavily co-opted content creators like Mr. Beast, Kai Cenat, Joe Budden, Pewdie Pie, (etc)-- they are usually sanitized, coached, & trained personalities picked based on who sponsors them and based on what makes the most ad profit for the platform. Most of that content seems to be very rigged and fake to me, as they clearly have staff working out of view. I find most of that manufactured (Picked YouTube Influencer) content to be drab and over-scripted... I can't stand watching it on & off YouTube personally.
Interesting channel scroller... The way it plays content also seems to look far more lively than watching YouTube on the regular site for some reason. I'd love to easily see the option to customize what is displayed based on the YouTube channels I already follow, and links back to subscribe to channel content I like while watching. A feed for specifically music-related content (by genre maybe) would be highly useful.
I specifically was talking about the Youtube TV content that is cable over ip.
YouTube TV was equal parts awesome and horrifying for the Olympics. It had plenty of great content, including a solid amount of 4k
It also had the worst search UX I have ever experienced.
Most importantly, recording an event did not guarantee you got the whole thing! There were numerous events I was watching from my ‘library’ that did not include the final 10-30 min of action. WTH? Did you really record based on time stamps alone? What year is this?!
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Thank you for the feedback, I'll see what I can do regarding the mono audio issue, and I'll try to add more features as soon as possible.
Bonus points if the TV guide is not interactive like they are today, but rather the old style that slowly scrolls at a fixed rate
You can probably do the audio fix systemwide with EasyEffects.
>Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono
In windows you can also go to "Ease of access audio settings" and click "Turn on mono audio". Useful for games which have positional audio which gets annoying (sf6 training room for example).
This is incredible and I want this on my TV, hooked up to my remote for exactly this experience.
If you are using windows, it allows you to switch sound to mono
iOS and macOS too, found in accessibility settings.
Regarding sound, if you are on a Mac you can use Audio Hijack to made the sound do anything you want.
> since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left/right and it's super distracting
I find this interesting. Are you oversensitive? I've never even considered that this could be an issue. Do you experience the same problem with other things like music and games?
Not the parent, but with similar view on panned audio. If it's music where it's done on purpose, no problem. But talking with audio in one ear? I'm out. Not sure why exactly, but it's very jarring.
For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.
If you have mpv+yt-dlp set up you can fix this with an audio filter to mix to mono.
Somewhat related, I've used
to fix videos which are annoyingly mirrored to avoid copyright. You could also bind these options to keys in mpv to use on the fly. Some videos will only mirror some parts of their footage.
Another fun one I bind in input.conf
Lets me rotate the video. I sometimes also just open a web image in mpv and rotate it like that to avoid tilting my head.
I also have these binds for unbalanced audio, mainly used with 5.1 audio to sound better on headphones or stereo speakers, and the \ bind one seems to make normal stuff slightly louder also, so sometimes I hit it when I don't wanna turn up my speaker knob for one video.
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As someone with minor but noticeable hearing issues, the reason it's so jarring is because our brain's audio processing center depends on both ears for understanding human speech.
If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.
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There's a small YouTube creator who has uploaded videos with the narration hard panned. I told him about it in the comments, he went "hmm that's weird", then uploaded more videos with the same issue.
I don't watch that channel any more.
I totally agree, I will not watch a video with any issues like these.
However, I also hate knowing that I'm hearing mono audio where stereo could be used. 99% of the videos I watch don't have panning issues, so to just turn off ALL stereo seems like such overkill to me...
In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it (differences in timing and volume inform your brain on the sound source location). Exception being if it's something really quiet right next to one ear, but that's relatively rare.
So when things are mixed "improperly" (it's subjective), it's very distracting to me. I don't need to force mono everywhere, but it's very common in amateurish channels, and surprisingly also in movies and TV shows. Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side. Like, somebody speaking to the left of the camera, and it comes 100% on the left channel and 0% on the right one. It's so unnatural and annoying to me.
> Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side.
I find this genuinely baffling; I lived for nearly a decade as a bachelor in a basement apartment where I had a big TV setup, but out of respect for my upstairs landlord listened to nearly everything on wireless stereo headphones, and I can’t recall ever experiencing this.
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>In the real world you almost never hear something on one ear but not the other. Even if something is on your left, your right ear still hears it
Exactly, and this highlights the big difference between using headphones and using speakers. When you listen to some stereophonic music with one of the instruments panned completely to one side, through speakers that sound will only play from that side, however the sound will bounce around your room and you'll hear it in both ears, and the difference will tell you where it's coming from. But when you listen through headphones, you don't get this effect, and it sounds weird. With modern computing devices, it shouldn't be that hard to run the music through a filter that mixes the two channels when using headphones to avoid this problem. I wouldn't want to mix them to mono (that sounds bad too), but just a slight reduction of the stereo separation would be good.
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