Comment by adrianmonk
6 hours ago
Delivering the bits is not the hard part of making a successful video platform. It's other stuff like recommendations and content discovery that is actually useful, allowing creators to monetize enough that they want to be on your platform, navigating legal issues, fighting spam and abuse, and getting enough users to sign up and start using your service.
Delivering the bits is a part of it though. When youtube changes its api in a way that forces NewPipe to change its algorithm, they have to push out a change that forces users to update the app. This is annoying because naturally you won't find NewPipe on the app store so updating the app is tedious for users who use it. The parent's workaround fixes some or all of this nuisance, depending on how implemented
Can't you just do "ota" updates like codepush used to do? ie shove a JavaScript asset with whatever is needed and allow the app to pull it at runtime?
Smarttube on Android TV just pulls its own APK so you just need to click Install after it downloads and opens it.
It not being on the app store doesn't meant that there can't be low friction updates. FFUpdater, for example, is plenty convenient.
still less tedious than ads or no background play
I don't find ads tedious at all. In fact, since I grew up with ads on tv, I miss them. The commercial break was a scheduled time to get a snack, go to the bathroom, get a snack, etc. Today's platforms put the ad breaks in such awkward spots that doing those things is a lot less natural. IMO, it's not the ads that after the problem; it's the way they are used.
There's an extension for Firefox enabling background play.
Delivering the bits might not be hard. Storing the bits is hard. Or at least expensive.
You could have local caches of the users recently watched videos on their machines as available seeds. bittorrent now also supports http based init seeds so you could create torrents with a verified sha of a youtube mp4 downloaded once or something like that.
if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers
That works if you fix everything to a single quality and codec. YouTube videos tend to have something like 20+ variants that can get dynamically switched between while the video is playing (adaptive streaming).
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.
Newpipe isn't trying to be a video platform