
Show HN: An Alternative Web Interface for YouTube - boramalper
http://essentialyoutube.com
======
Dachande663
Love that you can read the entire source in a few hundred lines of dead simple
JS[1].

[1] [https://github.com/boramalper/Essential-
YouTube/blob/master/...](https://github.com/boramalper/Essential-
YouTube/blob/master/index.js)

~~~
krat0sprakhar
Came here just to say this. Pleasantly surprised to see front-end project
without a package.json, a bundler, a UI library. Even the templating is
inline!

~~~
mediumdeviation
The template being inline is a bug, not a feature in my opinion. You can
actually write arbitrary templates into HTML using <script
type='text/template'> (or really any type other than 'javascript'), and with a
simple function get ~90% of the power of template strings in languages such as
ES6 or Python. Writing your templates into JS like that is plain ugly and
unmaintainable.

~~~
fnaticshank
I agree writing templates into JS like that is plain ugly. Using HTML5
template[1] tag is a better way to go. I used it in a fun project[2] and it
works flawlessly in all modern browsers

[1]:
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/templ...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/template)

[2]:
[https://github.com/shashankgroovy/notif](https://github.com/shashankgroovy/notif)

~~~
bunnybender
[2] works better with the y at the end ;-)

[https://github.com/shashankgroovy/notify](https://github.com/shashankgroovy/notify)

~~~
pyre
Could just be the next iteration of Motif[1]... ;-)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_\(software\))

------
manish_gill
I want something like this on the youtube dashboard. I want to see at a glance
the trends + subscriptions (and the subscriptions that are gaining
momentum/are popular). I don't want "recommendations" from youtube mixed in
with my regular feed. I cross them out and tell youtube that I'm not
interested in them and it just ignores that and shows them up again anyway.
Subscription list tends to "fade away". Older subscriptions are forgotten and
don't show up and only the new ones do.

Better organization of the playlists and a feature to search across my account
for playlist and the videos in them would be another amazingly important
feature that I want.

Went on a rant there. But I love youtube, except the interface is such a huge
turn off that it's quite annoying. I've been meaning to make an alternative UI
for it. It's been on the back-burner in my ideas.txt for quite a while. So I
just brain-dumped the most immediate complaints I had.

------
bradezone
Really dislike how titles are truncated after a fairly small number of words.
(I did a search for "on cinema" which is a comedy web series, and almost none
of the results showed a full title.) There seems to be no reason not to simply
let the titles wrap. Who cares if some result boxes are bigger than others?
Anyway, a potentially useful tool if this is corrected.

------
jasonkostempski
I've deleted my YouTube account and started using RSS to subscribe to
channels. If I could get it to open to this page instead I think I'd have just
about the exact experience I'd like. The only change I'd like to see is to
have the video fill the page (not full screen or "theater mode") and have
absolutely nothing else on there.

~~~
boramalper
See @nip's comment there! (if you are using Chrome)

------
arturventura
Allow me to go to your page just by entering a different domain, meaning
having a URL schema similar to that of youtube, that would make things much
simpler.

~~~
jswny
Yeah that's one of the reasons it is so simple and easy to use a service like
[http://unreddit.com/](http://unreddit.com/). Great suggestion.

------
pmontra
Clean interface but it made me (re)discover that the related videos are really
useful. When a video is over here is like "what now?" and I have to go back to
the search page. It wastes times. However I understood the spirit of the
experiment. It's just that YouTube with an adblocker and NoScript is not that
bad.

~~~
bajsejohannes
I'm torn on this. On one hand it's useful to have related videos, on the other
I find that it often leads to distractions. Maybe the latter is because
recommended videos on youtube is both related videos and "videos you might
like" (which means that researching a topic turns into watching standup comedy
I like or similar)

------
andy_ppp
A Chrome plugin to redirect any youtube URLs to this would be great :-)

~~~
nip
Switcheroo[1]: From
'[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v='](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=') To
'[http://essentialyoutube.com/#'](http://essentialyoutube.com/#') :)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switcheroo-
redirec...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switcheroo-
redirector/cnmciclhnghalnpfhhleggldniplelbg?hl=en)

~~~
badocr
Can that be made into a greasymonkey user.js? That would be sweet.

------
neonbat
these are the changes as per the about page:

Essential YouTube is an experiment to improve user experience by stripping the
redundant away and focusing on the essentials.

Features: Disruption-free Search The video keeps playing even while you are
searching. Instant Search See the results as you are typing. Queuing Queue
videos as you like to watch them consecutively. Looping Loop a video forever.
Hassle-free Video annotations are disabled by default. Also, no Autoplay, but
the videos you want to play. Client-side There are no servers in-between you
and YouTube; everything is done on your computer and it's open source. As
private as it could be.

Obvious it might sound, but please keep in mind that Essential YouTube is an
experiment, and as pleasing as it might be to use, it's not intended to be a
replacement for everyday use. Missing functionality is not a bug, it's a
feature.

------
wjoe
"Features: Disruption-free Search The video keeps playing even while you are
searching"

When I do a search, the audio of the video keeps playing, and there is a
working seek bar at the top, but the video itself vanishes. Not sure if this
is intentional, but I assume not based on the description (Firefox 47 on OS
X).

~~~
boramalper
Ah it is! Sorry if the description itself is misleading, but I thought it
would be nice to be able to listen, while skimming over search results, so I
decided to hid the video during searching.

Maybe I could do something like in YouTube's iOS wpp where video goes to down-
right corner, but I thought I would keep it simple.

~~~
Kesty
I think that is probably best solution.

Just having the audio I can easily do it right now by doing the search in
another tab while having the video playing in the background.

Anyway, I like the idea and what you did, even if it is still an early
project.

------
impostervt
In case any Google/YouTube people read this:

Please make a YouTube Red for kids. I love YouTube Kids, but it still has ads.
I will gladly pay for you $/month for this.

I don't watch Youtube, buy my kids never stop.

~~~
pbreit
Friend of mine made: [https://medium.com/@jhong/introducing-
cakey-8b646cc1768b#.nr...](https://medium.com/@jhong/introducing-
cakey-8b646cc1768b#.nr930wyd2)

------
mfoy_
Bookmarklet:

javascript:(function() { var url =
'[http://essentialyoutube.com/#';](http://essentialyoutube.com/#';) var
videoId = ''; var vars = window.location.search.substring(1).split("&"); for
(var i=0;i<vars.length;i++) { var pair = vars[i].split("="); if(pair[0] ==
'v') { videoId = pair[1]; break; }} if (!videoId) { return; } window.location
= url + videoId; })();

------
Jaruzel
Nice. I built a very basic 'clean youtube' player a long time back for
personal purposes, that enabled me to just have a floating window of the video
playing.

If anyone is interested, it's here:

[http://www.jaruzel.com/projects/youtube/](http://www.jaruzel.com/projects/youtube/)

------
woollysammoth
Very nice - hover states (or just cursor:pointer) on the search results would
be a good addition

~~~
boramalper
Fixed! Thank you.

------
Bromskloss
Can you make playlists? I'm not even thinking of having an account and storing
them there, but just to have a long URL that lists a bunch of videos to be
played.

------
qwertyuiop924
This is a great idea, but we can take it further. How about absolutely minimal
formatting for lightning fast pageloads, with a bare minimum of JS?

------
stuaxo
When I used the back button, the video started again at the beginning, it
would be good if it would remember the place, like bbc iplayer does.

------
mistermann
I wish someone would build an Android app for YouTube that doesn't absolutely
suck like the official one.

Or, has someone already done this and I'm not aware?

~~~
bgaluszka
Not sure what specifically you're looking for in such an app but I'm using
[https://newpipe.schabi.org/](https://newpipe.schabi.org/).

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Oh my god. Even in this app's broken, buggy, unfinished state, it is already
better than the official youtube app in some respects. Given the fact that I
tend to use subscriptions a lot, this doesn't really work for me yet though...

------
cmlaverdiere
Thanks for this! Youtube is terribly slow on my computer but this loads
instantly.

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benkarst
I am unable to navigate back and see my search.

------
mk89
Amazing!

Is this allowed by Google?

~~~
sbarre
It leverages the official API so I don't see why not.

~~~
spriggan3
> It leverages the official API so I don't see why not.

There is something called Terms Of Service. Just because you use an API it
doesn't mean you can do anything with it. It's important to read them, because
they can get you into legal troubles if you don't comply with these terms.

You should be really careful with this "YOLO" mindset, especially if you are a
professional developer.

------
LargeCompanies
reminds me of [http://ok-google.io](http://ok-google.io) 's interface

------
impe83
Pretty cool and lean!

------
fiatjaf
Is this lighter than YouTube?

