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?
> 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.
mpv --audio-channels=mono 'urlhere'
Somewhat related, I've used
--vf=lavfi="hflip"
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.
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.
\ af toggle lavfi=[dynaudnorm=f=100]
| af toggle lavfi=loudnorm
I have carla running at all times and put all of my system audio through various loopback devices (browser, voice conferencing, and music/system) and then apply varying degrees of compression to them (no surprise sounds, hard limiting to hear quiet people, and bypass -- respectively).
Of course everything goes through an extra limiter at the end to avoid clipping.
I also send the voice conferencing input and output through RNNoise, so I can avoid emitting terrible sounds and avoid hearing them as well.
People also seem to like me better when I cut my mids a little bit, but additional research is required.
The reason for this is that I can change browsers (or games or voice apps) and they all think I'm just using a normal mic and headset, but it's actually like 10 LSP plugins and various routing.
Still doesn't feel that complicated when you do a little bit at a time.
i love your spirit and it's interesting to read how you handle your sound, but it's almost comical to see someone describe using 10 freaking plugins to handle sound as 'not super complicated' :D
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.
>> Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.
That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.
I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.
Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)
"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."
This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...
"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."
This is personal experience, but it is the personal experience of my specialist telling me. [1] is some less anecdotal information on the subject. My use of the term "game over" was specifically for audible speech interpretation.
Lip reading is indeed something I'll probably need to get better at into my mid-30s and beyond as things continue to degrade. My hearing loss is low-frequency-first (Meniere's Disease [2]).
I was diagnosed with "glue ear" as a young child, which I don't think any doctor admits to these days! I had two lots of grommet related operations which involved inserting tiny plastic hollow cylinders into my eustachian tubes, to try and widen them. After a couple of years they were removed by a doctor with a sort of hooked probe. So two lots of treatment spanning around six years. That was in the seventies.
I remember being put into a sound proof booth and wearing headphones and being played pure tones from a generator and being told to press a button when I heard the tones. With hindsight, tinnitus would have played merry hell with those tests, especially at the frequencies they seemed to concentrate on. Yes, my memory is fine!
Did the treatment help? Probably not. I recall what the sounds of tinnitus were as a very young child and they are same now.
Since around aged 45 (I'm 53 now) I have experienced brief spinning/dizzy spells. I find them quite easy to counter. I first noticed them whilst wearing skis which was a bit disconcerting.
Having read up on your link to "Meniere's Disease" - that's probably what I ... have, for want of a better word. However, the dizzy spells for me are transitory and not certainly not minutes or hours.
I gave up smoking around six years ago after 30 odd years tabbing. That probably doesn't help either.
My point is that your faculties are very complicated and the science is somewhat lacking. Putting a name to a basket of symptoms may not even be helpful in our case. I am a (was) a really good swimmer but diving below around two metres deep used to really hurt unless I gently worked down and popped my ears.
In the end I think I have mild symptoms compared to many but I don't have many people to compare notes with. What becomes normal over years and decades hides a lot of things.
Based on my personal experience, you will automatically get better at lip reading or deducing what is going on via body language etc. I also have to wear glasses ...
Anyway, I wish you all the best and hope you find a way to live with whatever conditions you have. We have a surprisingly impressive array of sensors and back end processing gear. The eyes are amazing in being able to scan a scene with a tiny aperture and the brain to stitch together a very accurate scenario of what is where and doing what. Touch and all the rest are available, all the time. The next time you catch a ball, pick up a pen, kiss the missus/husband or whatever, remind yourself of how amazing that is, and you are.
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...
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.
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.
>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.
Is it really possible that there's no driver that is capable of doing this in Windows? Did you look into this?
I wouldn't know because I consider all those effect libraries, mixers and presets ("Concert Hall" - who would ever want that?) that usually come with the audio chipset driver suite as bloatware and try to get rid of them, or at least never touch them - but it would surprise me if there weren't anything that affects the amount of stereo separation...?
I haven't looked into it, no (and certainly not on Windows!). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's already readily available software that does exactly this. Even my phone has a bunch of options for altering the sound, including something called "DTS:X 3D Surround".
> 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.
Me neither, I also only use my headphones. I've only had to use mono mode on amateur youtube videos where one of the audio channels is just missing. It has never been an issue on big productions.
>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).
It’s an odd “in between” between classic TV and YouTube itself.
If you want to watch “the most likely thing you would want to watch” (NFL, Olympics main feed), YouTubeTV is great.
But as soon as you want to find something off the top few recommendations, it gets much harder. Compare that to regular TV, when I could just remember 27 is Discovery Channel and get there instantly.
The answer is pretty obvious. They don't want people remembering the content producers. Same reason they've worked so hard to kill the subscription feed on YouTube. They want you to rely on their recommendation engine.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
The best part of this is the channel doesn't pause when you flip away from it. It is always "running" and if you flip away you will miss it. That builds in a FOMO trade-off which causes user to automatically/subconciously decide on channel they most want to watch, because they can't watch everything.
> I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon.
I doubt it would. The modern style of binging on-demand streaming content seems to be too effective at capturing attention. Remember that lots of people get notifications on their phone the instant a new video comes out for a subscribed channel, especially kids and teens who haven't developed resistance to these business models.
YT would be unlikely to spend any effort implementing an alternate mode that doesn't capture attention as effectively; the old model of live channels is likely a niche preference. If somehow this did prove to be more effective at capturing attention, I could see it being implemented, but that would surprise me.
I hate that if anytime I upload a short video it forces the video to YouTube shorts.
Especially since I’m not making content for the public - it’s more a demo video or something to specifically send to a few people.
As with so many services nowadays, I like the ability to use YouTube shorts when I want, but I hate that it’s forced upon us with no reasonable and consistent method to not use shorts at the users discretion.
But that triggers an immediate tiktok dopamine chase. I immediately want to judge what I'm seeing and swipe to move on. I start wondering about the ML training on my every move and hesitation. It's restless
Along the same lines, I have a near-terabyte of videos I have downloaded from Youtube, of my own vast and multivariate interests, and having it on random, with a simple pause/next/prev-style interface, is also a compelling viewer-experience equillibrium akin to the sets of yore ..
I have long wanted Netflix to offer this feature. Just give me a random episode of a low stakes sitcom. Seinfeld, SVU, whatever.
My other wishlist item was that Netflix would offer a “shuffle” this series option. For standalone episodic shows, ordering does not matter, and it is a bunch of overhead to pick something.
They experimented with it for a bit last year. I think Linus talked about it on the WAN show, and for a while LTT had it enabled on their channel.
It was essentially a 24/7 livestream which played from their back catalogue, with the ability to add "promo" segments in between videos, which they used for products on their merch store.
Seemed to dissapear around the same time the whole monoblock scandal and production shutdown happened last year, so I'm not sure if the YouTube experiment also concluded or if they turned it off during the shutdown.
I added ErsatzTV to my Plex setup about a month ago and we honestly love it so much. I've got 2 sitcom channels, British panel shows, Taskmaster, all Star Trek all the time, British sitcoms, cartoons, and a few others.
Its really nice to just sit down and watch "whatever is on" (even though I could switch over to the main library and watch any episode I want).
Sometimes I just want a 0-effort/0-decision background noise while I work on something else or browse on my phone.
I've done the same thing with dizqueTv for my grandmother. On her Android TV, I was able to integrate the IPTV channels on the same channels list, so she can simply use the remote to navigate between the digital channels and the IPTV channels (30 for Hercule Poirot, 31 for classic B&W movies, etc.)
I've also been using ErsatzTV with my jellyfin setup. It can take a while to setup channels how you want them, but I love my sci-fi channel which is going through all the Star Treks, Stargates, and Twilight Zones.
It is so much easier to flip it on to my Sci-fi Channel, animation channel, movie channel, or James Bond marathon channel then to decide what to watch. And since I've seen all this content, it is often kinda nice to start in the middle of an episode.
I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps that I use as some filler content if I want episodes to start on the hour.
I've been thinking a lot about setting up some kids channels with specific hours (like channel comes on at 7am, goes off during part of the day, comes back on in the afternoon, and goes offline at bedtime) for my siblings kids, as I think letting them just browser youtube kids is terrible.
There's a torrent going around the usual places that has every [as] bump from the launch of the network to whenever they last updated the archive (a few months ago in my case.)
Do you know if that can operate with no transcoding?
I’ve designed my media set-up around Jellyfin on a weak server that can’t handle transcoding, and very-capable clients that don’t need it. This lets me avoid like half the bugs on the Jellyfin bug tracker and all the instability an Nvidia or AMD video card would introduce to the server itself.
I’m very interested in this, but can’t use it if it must transcode.
No, it must transcode to work correctly, which can be a problem for me too (although I just have an intel card and use vaapi).
I believe there is a container you can use where it doesn't transcode, but it trips up every player I have tried, as they do not like having different resolutions/codecs suddenly swap.
Intel Quicksync is very capable (even more so than most AMD/Nvidia cards) and any 7th gen or newer Intel CPU with integrated graphics has it and has good codec support.
It’s an old used Lenovo workstation. It has a some kind of quad-core Intel processor but can’t usefully transcode from h.265 at all (no hardware support, I assume) and is bad at most other codecs at resolutions above 720p or so. Even transcoding within its limits seems to tax it, so I doubt it could maintain two transcodes at once in any case—we sometimes have three streams going, or one or two plus someone playing on its Minecraft server, and it can keep up with all that just fine, but transcoding’s out.
I’ve even seen it turn into a slideshow remuxing original video with transcoded audio. It’s not very capable.
I was checking out their docs and ran across this option for channels:
> HLS Direct does not transcode content and can perform better on low power systems, but does not support watermarks and some clients will have issues at program boundaries
Sounds like that might be what you’re looking for?
ErsatzTV is amazing. It’s actually excellent for settings up kids channels. You can configure start and end times and select a pool of content/shows/movies to pick from.
One nifty feature is that you can configure “filler” content to inject randomly between episodes. I used this to add short educational clips from a kids TV channel in the Middle East.
I've been using Quasi TV (android app) to try out the concept. I remember having something similar back in the boxee / xbmc days. I especially liked that it "just worked" without having to set anything up besides pointing it at my plex. I'm not afraid of hosting something, but I didn't want to go through the trouble if it turned out I wasn't going to use it.
I quite like it. Unfortunately, the app's been a bit buggy - not always picking up the stream at the "current time" and sometimes navigation gets wonky. But it was a good test run and that, along with your post, has convinced me to give Ersatz (or something like it) a try.
Another observation: with this setup, you essentially randomly jump into the middle of videos, skipping what is usually the most grating part of the show: the intro.
In the intro to most shows/videos, there's annoying jingles, silly animations, a redundant summary of what's about to happen in an already short segment, or just useless chatter "hey guys! it's your boy, _. welcome to my channel, remember to smash that like button, we have a great show today".
Because of all this intro bloat, I tend to jump a few minutes into most YouTube videos by default.
I don't see how this is a good thing. It's a totally artificial constraint. It's already impossible to watch everything on youtube. I don't want software I use to instill fear as a design goal, detached from any of the outcomes of user actions.
The FOMO would only work if the content was exclusively available during that livestream, and not re-posted later.
That being said, I think the last thing society needs is to make these platforms more addictive. The algorithms already do a good enough job of keeping us glued.
I use Pluto for this. Quick download, no sign up required, and tons of topic-specific channels to switch to. I put it on all my devices and don't even worry about it.
Google TV also has a "Live" tab that collects all the live channels across all your apps and puts it into a TV guide grid. I've installed Fubo and Tubi and others just to build out my TV guide.
I was part of Pluto's launch team. We used to literally just be 95% YouTube embeds that were forced into a live-like experience client-side. Getting simple YouTube or even HTML5 video API calls to work reliably in 2013 was quite a feat. Loads of people still had Flash, mobile browsers were a crapshoot, and I caused many many thousands of early Amazon Fire TV hard restarts due to crashing their (kernel?) video decoder somehow.
Each channel displays the video code for the YouTube video its playing so if you see something interesting you can easily access the video. I really like this as a curated discovery tool, there is something up flipping thru channels and catching something at just the right time to peak your interest that viewing a clickbaity thumbnail and video title just can't replicate.
Similarly I find I sometimes enjoy listening to the radio more than Spotify because I don't feel forced to min/max my enjoyment. I have to listen to whatever is on.
This is something I always wonder... Something that I really miss from TV on internet content (YouTube, movie streamings and so on) is turn it on and watching what's being transmitted without thinking about what I wanna see.
Three reasons:
1. Picking something to watch takes time. Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I'm dining alone. My meal gets cold before I start the video
2. Choosing something to watch is stressful. If I'm tired and I don't know what I want to see makes me more tired and frustrated. These are the times that I don't want the freedom to watch I want because they are the times that I don't want to think about what I want
3. The random factor of watching something that I would never watch by myself it's something that makes me go outside my bubble. I can't say how many good movies (or songs, etc) I found by that randomness
I'm not against the freedom of streaming services but there are moments that I just don't want that freedom. So, thank you!
The recommendation algorithms suggests things that are related to what I watched before. And I still need to choose one of the options that it recommends.
Agreed, my recommendations are extremely narrow. Usually videos from the same three content creators, and ones that I've already seen or in there chronological queue that I already plan to watch.
This works pretty well for YT when it knows your preferences, but for streaming TV services like Netflix I find it's a box of chocolates full of shit. It's just going to be whatever is being "promoted" at the time and has the most widespread appeal, not something interesting.
> Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I'm dining alone.
I think the YouTube recommendation algorithm you get from opening the app or viewing the front page is good for this. They have a lot of random content and when the algorithm gets to know you, it will suggest things of interest that can be consumed this way.
I have so many subscriptions on youtube that the home recommendation is actually a quicker way to find something interesting if I have limited time, since the subscriptions are full of shorts and 'reruns' now where creators try to monetize old videos in new ways.
The only issue is that my youtube is the one on the main tv, so sometimes the suggestions get messed up when my kids watch. Youtube probably has a really confusing set of conflicting beliefs about who I am.
My kids mostly watch on tablets which are their own. On the TV, they have separate profiles on all the streaming apps. We don't do YouTube much on TV but when we do, I've always been sure to give them a different device that is not logged into my account.
If I lend them a device to watch YouTube I usually do it in the browser in incognito.
My youtube recommendations on my laptop are just short videos(all are below 3 mins with a few exceptions ;-;)
I get so much better recommendations by using youtube tv but it sucks that they don't let us switch preferences. But well results in me spending less time on youtube so a win heh
YT is the best choice for something random for a small amount of time, but is absolutely maimed at the free-tier by 2 leading ads requiring 1+ user interactions to skip.
I can't easily press 'skip' with a plate of pasta in one hand and a fork in another, and I don't want to watch two 2:30 leading ads, so I guess I'll just go somewhere else.
The solution to a lot of those is to just have a goto show that you watch. Before netflix removed The Office, that is what I always did when wanting something to watch while eating a snack on the couch or to have noise on in the background. I'd just fire up netflix and resume whatever episode it was last one.
We ditched cable forever ago, but I do find that I miss just watching 15 minutes of some random show like I used to. I usually forget about it until I'm at someone's house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.
> The solution to a lot of those is to just have a goto show that you watch.
Cool! I have a list of movies to watch that I write from several recommendations sources, so I can try focus in watching instead of choosing. I can't say the same about music, I'm stuck for years hearing almost the same bands, which is kinda sad...
> I usually forget about it until I'm at someone's house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.
Another good point, watching something that I don't need to pay too much attention because I don't care about the subject, but can entertain me while I do other things... Here in Brazil that kind of shows that "we watch, we like but we don't know why" is a recurring joke, and we have three main ones: one about farming (Globo Rural), one about fishing (Pesca Alternativa) and one about trucks (Siga Bem Caminhoneiro)
>Here in Brazil that kind of shows that "we watch, we like but we don't know why" is a recurring joke, and we have three main ones: one about farming (Globo Rural), one about fishing (Pesca Alternativa) and one about trucks (Siga Bem Caminhoneiro)
Are those public access type shows that are meant to be somewhat educational?
They are public access. Globo Rural for example is broadcasted every sunday morning. It's well produced, and its calm pace, its opening theme and the farming landscapes makes us feel good vibes. It fits perfectly the moment of waking up in the weekend, without having thinking about work and just chilling while we drink a coffee
> I can't say the same about music, I'm stuck for years hearing almost the same bands, which is kinda sad...
I like SiriusXM for this. I'm often finding new channels to listen to, and once I pick a channel I don't have to pick out songs.
Apple Music has some features that can work similarly, such as radio stations (though a lot of theirs are really more like podcasts) or they have lots of playlists of recommended hits from different genres and you can shuffle them.
WHY is there not an "I'm feeling lucky" button for streaming services. Akin to "give me anything," though, I suspect the answer is the more time spent scrolling, the less data has to be streamed over the wire, so it's cheaper.
More likely it is the inverse: Selecting a random video at scale is the costly problem.
You can certainly fake it as a workaround. For example, you'll notice that "I'm feeling lucky" on Google simply follows the first search result. Streaming services could take what is already computed as the first result on the "Home" page and use that, for example.
But at that point why not just click on the first video? Unlike Google, which doesn't give you much until you enter a search query, all of the streaming services I know of have already given you your "lucky" matches by the time a "I'm feeling lucky button" could be presented. Two buttons side-by-side that do the exact same thing doesn't offer much.
You're going to see the second item no matter what, unless streaming services give up showing any videos on initial interaction. But I expect that really is the best user interface for most users.
> More likely it is the inverse: Selecting a random video at scale is the costly problem.
if that feature existed it would never be a random video from all the available videos. It'd be a random-seeming video from a carefully curated selection of videos that youtube wants to push at certain users, and in some cases were paid to promote. Users wouldn't know and wouldn't care anyway because they pushed a button and got content without thinking.
That all makes sense and I never really considered the selection of the video being the costly problem at scale. Thanks!
The only response I have is that purposefully-clicking the 'random' button has a psychological effect over clicking the first video returned which (gut check) makes me think it will be more easily tolerated if it ends up being "off-beat" since I didn't explicitly click the first selection (thus choosing it).
I hadn't watched actual television for years. Then, in a visit to my parents house, I randomly got to watch a band in a talkshow that later became a band that I love.
What I am really missing is a "Play random episode" or "Randomize episodes" button on TV shows. I want to just flip on Seinfeld or Family Guy and watch random episodes, not in order. Such a missed opportunity for Netflix, etc.
Part of that is because of the trend from the past few years (ever since Lost I believe but there's probably previous like soap operas) that TV shows are continuous. But even the 90's TV shows would have some continuity, referencing previous events. That said, I've been rewatching Star Trek DS9 (and may do so with Stargate as well) and the main overarching plot beats often happen at the start and end of a season, the episodes in between can often be randomised.
How strange, I’m the complete opposite. I’d never go back to letting corporates dictate how I engage with content; I even avoid recommender algorithms for the same reason. Being able to choose is so valuable to me.
The entire way those platforms work is literally that. Ironically TV didn't dictate how to engage with content because there was not much. Compared to comment sections algorithmically boosting trolls to make you compulsively comment
I’m both, at times I don’t want to choose, at times I want full control. I didn’t have TV for years (was pushing a decade), but ~2months ago I got myself an analog antenna that has local channels and it’s been a blast: I caught some olympic games, watched Euro cup, couple of movies (I caught “Decision to leave” from my watchlist——tremendous movie), I saw some Anthony Bourdain shows and now I know who the guy is and i enjoyed the show, saw a documentary on war in my country, watched some live streams of city council meetings… Also, I wanted to say this somewhere in this thread I’m not trying to sell tv to you, you caught a stray bullet, but also I’m sharing that I watched it with a different curiosity after so long of not having it, and did have a great time just with those 17 channels of uncurated content, which was the main motivation——to have uncurated content
Exactly. I go out of my way to try to make sure that the content is consume is "pulled" and not "pushed" as much as possible. I'm happy to take genuine recommendations from actual people, but I don't care what companies want me to see or listen to, and I resent it when they limit my options to try to force my hand.
I think there's merit in both. One thing that is lost from choosing what you want to watch is that you don't get surprised anymore unless you want to be surprised, whereas with traditional TV you'd encounter things you didn't expect, or come across a movie you never heard of before. I think there's space for both.
Or to make another analogy, if you go out and sit at a bench, who knows what will pass by?
I miss channel surfing (a little). But from when the cable box was a dumb pipe and the picture would switch near instantaneously. The 3 seconds between channels in the last couple of decades was super obnoxious to me.
Yeah, digital TV feels like a step back in that regard, but on the other hand it makes you reconsider switching / browsing channels. And of course the advantage is higher image quality and more channels.
Get Plex. There's a ton of free live streaming channels for a ton of tastes and genres. Some of them I think to myself "This should have been a steaming channel years ago".
Why are you stressed about what to select, when it is guaranteed that any selection you make will be better than something a network would select for you to watch? Just pick anything.
This is a good idea for this app, but maybe the least realistic part of the old TV experience. You'd have maybe 3 "premium" channels of a mix of tv shows, news, talk shows, sports. Maybe a dedicated sports channel and dedicated news channel. A channel more biased towards educational shows. A channel or two of weird low-budget shows (local access). A few channels that don't come in well (static and distortion). And add some off-air "colorbars" sometimes. And a channel or two in a foreign language.
And then force the user to get off the couch and walk to the monitor to turn a knob when you want to change channel...
Also diy and maker channel.
Just add voidlabs, mitxela, some other makers Colin furze, adam savage and some woodworking channels, like four eyes furniture. Some metalworkers like inheritance machining. Just general creative engineering stuff but not documentaries.
It'd be really awesome to have a link to the channel and video that is playing in case I want to find it later. This is a wonderful discovery tool, but I'd really love to be able to save the content I discover!
I just wasted the last 2hrs watching instead of working and I have not even made it past Channel 8. Thank God there're only 12 channels, I was afraid they would find me dead from starvation at my workstation in about a week's time.
Great. Can you elaborate a little on how channels are populated? Do you search YT for tags and order by most recent videos first? Or do you do some manual curation?
I'm curious here too, I only flipped through your channels for a minute, but found something interesting immediately.
I go to youtube and seem to run out of quality quickly. I even went as far as crawling the HN frontpage for videos - see hacker news TV - https://xiliary.com/bck/hn-tv.html
Going through your comments I see that you answered this elsewhere, and said that videos are handpicked [0]. Congrats for the dedication this implies!
So now my question is, how do you imagine this will work going forward? Do you plan on selecting more videos indefinitely, or are you working on some search system?
I'll never understood why Netflix, Hulu and others haven't done something similar to this. It's a much more natural way of "finding out" what you want to see. Create a bunch of channels based on existing tags or categories, have thing playing on a schedule, and allow me to zap through.
Bonus points if you allow me to zap as efficiently as I was able to back when we had analog TVs and cable. I was the master zapper, zapping through hundreds of channels in seconds. Just buffer the adjacent channels and calculate the maximum input latency.
Likely from a lack of engaging longform content on IG. Who wants to watch a continuous reel of mind-numbing shorts for hours. Youtube has enough quality content to make a more compelling product in this format
My guess would be that the primary users would keep it on as background noise in some room or another, and it would take a significant amount of data for comparatively little benefit.
I think this is the reason why "shorts" , or tiktok style videos work. I think YT shorts does this in a way, where you get a snippet of a long video as a shorts
Well done. My team built this at Disney six years ago when we were trying to solve content discovery problems. The problem with endless carousels of thumbnails is that it really doesn't draw you in. Sometimes you just need to drop people into content like it's channel surfing.
Netflix tried something similar a few years ago, but in my opinion it missed a critical ingredient, which was dropping people into the middle of content at a compelling point.
Really like the execution here. YouTube take note.
I can't speak to Netflix. At Disney the willingness to experiment with streaming UX was thin on the ground six years ago. It was about making something that felt like a direct Netflix competitor. Other experiments have shipped since then, like co-viewing.
I actually believe TikTok is more of the spiritual inheritor of this kind of project more than any other platform.
I guess what I am trying to ask is why was UX research "thin on the ground" (lovely expression, never heard it before). Was it a profit loss thing or more like the progress wasn't fast enough
could that be solved by finding and using the 'most replayed' mark timestamps for each video and using that to find the best start points for each video
Depends on the content and how it tends to be consumed. That might work for YouTube but maybe not, say, Netflix or services that stream movies.
We did a mix of human curation and random selection, noting which random selections were successful and which were not. It was effective enough. The thing about an experience like this is that it doesn't need to be perfect. Like channel surfing, if it doesn't catch you then just switch the channel.
Part of the issue with endless carousels of thumbnails now is that the thumbnails are almost invariable clickbait now. What will I actually get? I have no idea. Even YouTube channels I genuinely enjoy use thumbnails which are entirely different from the actual content. I suppose sensationalism has taken over.
No, I don't blame them at all. I make the odd YouTube video and the choice not to use these thumbnails is essentially a choice to stay irrelevant. Not to say sensational thumb nails would help; I make boring videos. But even if they were meant to be more interesting, that choice would clearly be self-sabotaging.
I think the user intent matters. When I go to Netflix to choose what I want to watch the last thing I want is to be dropped into the middle of random content. I hate auto playing videos when I'm trying to decide if I even want to watch this.
On the other hand when I go to tiktok I get thrown into a random content at every finger flick and I'm delighted because that's exactly why I went there.
If Netflix had well personalized mini tiktok mode serving interesting scenes from the movies you can watch there it could do wonderfully.
Interesting movie scenes is entire genre of tiktok videos. Another movie related genre is narrated summaries of weird movies. This requires bit of work to prepare but still could do well.
TikToks has a bunch of channels playing juicy clips from random movies and shows. always have to pop into hashtag or comments to find out what. Maybe they got axe, I don't see them in my feed anymore, but more than a few times I wished there was one click to keep watching optinos. There's always short form video that gets people side tracked, why not side track into an episode of a show.
Neat! I have wondered how much of a foothold "retrograde" tech will take in the next 10-20 years.
Decision fatigue, nostalgia, attenuation — call it what you will. At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
A very modern malaise. Excuse the armchair philosophizing.
There's certainly a market for it among the older crowd, but for those who've spent their formative years consuming content in the Netflix / Youtube era ... you can't miss what you've never had. I do echo the decision fatigue complaint - there is simply too much content out there to meaningfully engage with. The downsides of living in such a connected world ...
This is actually very untrue. It sound right but it's not. A lot of the younger crowd takes to analogue devices as bees to honey when they've had a chance to use it. Vinyl is a growth market. Tapes are being collected. Even film roll companies are experiencing year over year growth. Since their demise 10 years earlier. I think it's because all these things are not "nothing" you can destroy them, lose them, sell them, buy them, own them, give them away, hold them, they are unique and hard to copy.
> At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
I don't think there's enough useful and organized information to evaluate. There's no reason for everyone to be stuck in a vast ocean of content labeled with a handful of vague categories, except that that's just the way that someone decided to make it.
If I want to figure out if I want to try a game, I can go to steam and watch a trailer, look at the tags, and still have no idea if the game is worth playing. How do I make a decision?
If I just watch 3 minutes of a lets play, or a live stream, I can get an idea of what the game is like. This youtube channels thing is giving us exactly that experience.
Opening a youtube video directly, on the other hand, is an entire ordeal. It's slow to load, takes up a bunch of ram, puts the video in your history and messes up the minigame of trying to micromanage the algorithm so you don't end up with bad recommendations. It's hard to just simply watch a few seconds of a bunch of videos to get a vibe.
There's so much low hanging fruit in terms of content organization/discovery, it drives me insane that the experience is generally so bad, and getting worse.
Clay Shirky gave a talk on this years ago (also I think it's a blog post) called "It's not information overload, it's filter failure". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
This is actually making me think about how I watch programs when I dont really need to focus in on anything. I wonder if there is a plug-in where you can spin the wheel between types of media to watch and it selects one for you.
`wget -r -np -k https://ytch.xyz` - downloads the website recursively
`wget https://ytch.xyz/list.json` - download the list of what every channel plays and will play (I'm not sure if this ever really changes. The real website adds ?t=<time since epoch in ms>)
Then for instance run `python3 -m http.server` and visit localhost:8000
How are you making this list? The thing I surprisingly miss about tv is that what to watch was someone else's problem. YouTube overwhelms me with choices, TV was simple, I liked maybe 4-5 channels and (I later realized) I was implicitly trusting them to have something good on.
If I was allowed to dream, I imagine a world where that specialization is brought back. People curating a feed, which was on average good.
The author was replying to everyone, even me, but didn’t respond to my question about how the list is made.
This makes me assume that it’s hand-made. If so, it’ll probably get 1 or 2 updates (if even that many) and then remain static as the creator loses interest. Wouldn’t be the first time.
EDIT: list has changed. Trying to track it, we'll see what happens. I really hope the author has some way to search Youtube for trending videos based on some query/tag, and re-generates a list once a day or something like that.
Well, this website is completely cloneable, the JS is non-minified, so adding in community lists is certainly possible. Maybe just a tool to create those lists collaboratively. Good idea!
The possibilities are endless. You can build a site that lets any user create their own personalized tv with content from any streaming provider that has an api. This can be done in a few hours literally. And you don't even have to host them since it's all client side javascript. Honestly if I weren't so busy with my own project I would consider contacting OP to see what we could do with this.
Am I the only child of the 80s that hates this? A bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, and then I switched off. The moment TiVo was available we had it in our house and it was great. I still like the occasional shared experience of big sporting events or Eurovision or something on broadcast TV, but outside that it's just the equivalent of doomscrolling. If you look at your plethora of streaming options today and can't find anything to watch, just do something else. The wonder of the modern age is the sheer volume of stuff you can ignore entirely and never care about.
I'm a child of the 80s too and I haven't watched TV in a decade, save for the occasional TV in hotel room. I do miss the luxury of occasionally having what you watch already decided for you and the serendipity of discovering something engaging by accident. Lately it has started to feel like all the choices we have in modern life and the decision paralysis that entails is causing more not less stress. I'd hazard the biggest problem with the old format was not so much the lack of control as the lack of quality content and paradoxically having too much choice with the explosion of cable tv channels. I think there's space for a refined version of something like this to coexist with all the modern options - something like a personalized curator that picks quality content tailored to your tastes and just plays it without you having to decide exactly what to watch beyond flipping (a limited number of) channels.
I really like how there are only 12 channels, and you don't get to choose what's on. The only way to make it even more like tv from a few decades ago would be if half of the channels were static.
Given how full of crap content and intrusive ads YouTube is these days, I actually kinda miss tv from back then. About the only benefits at this point are time shifting and pause/rewind.
With real TV and a DVR you haven't had to see a single commercial in the last 25 years if you didn't want to.
We don't talk enough about how streaming has forced us into a much worse experience with ads that are unskippable, privacy-invading, and now I hear they're being dynamically inserted into programming mid-scene.
We talked about it plenty back when the legacy media companies were refusing to move online. "The ad spend isn't nearly a high online." they would say, with "Yeah, but people actually watch the ads online. Give it a few minutes." in response.
I've long since concluded that YouTube's ads are merely a way of persuading me to upgrade to Premium. Given that they actually seem to be pretty good at recommending content to me I am mystified by why the ad selection is so awful.
1. If the ad selection is too good, people will fall into the uncanny valley. They have to make it terrible enough to maintain user confidence.
2, They may not have anything better to select from. Quickly start/stop the ads a few times and it will usually (but not always) give up on showing any ad at all, which suggests to me that the available ad pool at that point in time is being exhausted.
But doesn't it make sense to pay for targeted political ads towards people opposed to you? The algorithm allows advertisers to do targeted advertising, and you were targeted, the subtle implication that targeted advertising would only show you "what you want to see" was intentional and misleading to get people on board with their attention being sold to the highest bidder.
It's still trivial to block these though with a combination of uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock. Despite Google's ongoing efforts to make this impossible.
have you forgotten how bad commercials were back then, and still are?
I haven't watched TV in years and years and years, because of the ads. I have a YouTube premium subscription and I am not ever going to watch broadcast or cable tv again. ever.
By “bad” I mean “commercials exist and are shown on TV”.
I don’t ever want to see a commercial. I have never been influenced by one. I never will be unless they change dramatically. There is no sales pitch that does not immediately make me dislike the salesperson.
“You don’t deserve your money as much as I do.” That’s all a commercial is. “We want your money so here is some quick audio and maybe video designed to convince you to give your money to us, in exchange for something less valuable than the amount you paid.”
if we're talking about stuff to make it more authentic, how about looking up my local weather if there's a strong storm the quality drops + more static, and a small
(rng) chance of it completely breaking if the antenna upstairs got completely broken by the strong wind.
For real accuracy of tv of a few decades ago they could add a 13th channel that takes content from Pornhub, but then adds a bunch of filters so you can barely see anything.
Integrate a Kinect / Realsense camera that estimates your body pose, so you have to stand in front of the computer and hold your arms in a specific way to direct a weak signal into the rabbit-ears...
This blew my mind, it's such a different experience. Currently watching the music channel (8, The Lumineers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)).
Since the author is reading here, one feature request: Please put a volume slider on it and also make a mouse wheel scroll on any part of the page change the volume.
I think it's the lack of timeshift which triggers me so much, since it's a somewhat standard feature on TVs. No way to pause makes me a bit anxious. I have a bad habit of nesting YT videos, where I pause one, watch another, pause that one, watch another, when it finishes I go back to the previously paused one and so on until I end up watching the first video to the end.
Theoretically you could add a per-client timeshift feature.
Because you want it to be a hurdle. The hurdle nudges you to not go to the YouTube experience and stay in the YouTube tv experience. So to the creator: the way you did it now is perfect!
I've always wanted a recreation of 80s Saturday morning cartoons, you can choose one channel to watch and if you switch away to another channel, it's gone, just like this. You have three primary channels and two secondary or "local" channels (and maybe a PBS) to choose from. It's a 5½ hour block, to simulate starting at like 6am and going until 11:30am. You get a bunch of half-hour kid and pre-teen shows for a few hours, and then you get some more older teen-oriented shows (like Saved By the Bell), and a 1½ hour block of the cartoon variety-hour shows like The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. CBS would always have some kind of wild-animal showcase. Throw in some toy commercials, School House Rock, the Time for Timer PSA ("A hanker for a hunk of cheese!"), and those bumpers that showed you how to make the "come back can" and how to whistle with an acorn top.
It's the delivery and the format that I'm nostalgic for, it doesn't need to be the vintage material. It would be cool to have some modern School House Rock and PSA and mini-craft projects.
Grab a big bowl, a box of cereal, and a carton of milk and just veg out in your pajamas on the couch on a weekend morning.
I did this in Plex using DizqueTV. It was a blast to set up, schedule, and insert a selection of toy ads from the era to make it feel real.
Of course, I only watched it once or twice before I realised I am not capable of sitting through 6 hours of cartoons any more. The sugary cereal made me feel sick, too.
Regarding the iframe, the YT controls. Someone has noted that it takes the TV experience away. I agree, but hiding the YT embedded UI is against TOS. Plus the UI already has sound control, subtitles, link to the video - features that others suggested here.
I have an extra suggestion: Maybe some keyboard key mapping, like up/down for switching the channel. I'm imagining having this perma-running in a small PC connected to a TV and the small wireless remotes have mappings for the arrow keys and up/down for channel would be perfect for that. (maybe other mappings as well)
Are we going full circle from TV to streaming back to TV? Probably not, but I do really enjoy the discovery aspect as well as reducing the overwhelming options of streaming down to a few channels.
This has a super smooth feel and throws you directly in, really well done.
Its the discovery aspect I miss, even cable had channels you could look at shows of a type - scyfi or Arena etc. Even free to air had reliable shows pre picked for you that you could rely on being decent. Now there's a fire hose of shows on Netflix, some good, some bad finding something to watch is now a task.
As someone who grew up with a handful of channels and no recording or TV guide besides the one that came in the paper, this experience is pretty accurate* , so kudos on the execution, but in contrast with some other comments, it is not nostalgic in any positive way. I will gladly take clickbait thumbnails and titles over wasting time flipping through garbage.
* It's missing the part where you get your little sister to hold the antenna in a certain position so you can get a clear picture.
This is perfect. Can it be customized (with custom channels and schedules)?
I was looking for exactly this to control my (and my kid's) TV habbits. My TV is only for YouTube. Everything we like watching is on Youtube.
But with remote in hand, it NEVER STOPS. We (and my kid) keep jumping from one video to another. When I watched TV as a kid, I only had to be in-front of TV on a schedule. I would be doing something else in other times.
Love how you captured the feel of channel surfing. Seems like most videos/channels I surfed through were at the midpoint or near completed in their play through (usual if you just hop on the tube at the middle of the hour).
Goodness. I never realized how nostalgic it would feel to flip channels. Your project took me all the way back to being a kid in the 90s and clicking through channels on the TV at my grandparents' house after school.
I love it when I unexpectedly encounter something that turns on the nostalgia in such a deep way. Awesome project.
Do I love it because of the nostalgia, or is there something novel here worth exploring further?
One thing about analog interfaces is that they are really in a way empowering to the User. Don't like what you're seeing? Just one button press or the turn of a tuner dial and you're outta there and into a new thing. And there is no algorithm telling you what to tune into or which channels you see. Heck, if you want you could tune your radio in-between the station and listen to the static of the atmosphere for an hour.
As a programmer with UI experience (for both physical and graphical UIs) I am aware that nothing stops us from deploying similar paradigms in the digital domain and this is yet another example to make the point, that it is possible.
Sadly few companies nowadays have any incentive to make their interfaces so neutral, egalitarian and simple. It seems to take a special kind of radicalism to commit to limited controls and not slap open ended navigational structures, menus and so on onto a touchscreen. Car interfaces come to my mind.
I worked at Google ~ 2010 and I distinctly remember playing with a TV like experience like this that Youtube was working on (it was part of the Google TV efforts at the time). I don't remember if it made it to the public but it's probably in the large graveyard of cool products Google killed.
Wow this is really cool! Such a simple idea but very well executed and definitely hits the nostalgia factor too. As others have mentioned, I do miss the "stress-free-ness" of not having to pick a specific content to watch and how everyone is getting the same stream at the same time.
I've built a similar thing 3 years ago -> https://tv.istasyon.app
Your comments here are golden and congrats to @hadisafa for his clean and simple execution.
My project was never used (except me and just my family) nor resurfaced on forums etc. but our choice of the same favicon touched me :)
My concern for such a project was that I found using the content that others created without attributing the og creator a bit sketchy.
Encountering this reminds me of the earlier days of the internet when finding novel things like this was a common occurrence. Reminds me of something you'd find using StumbleUpon.
Must be my crappy internet connection that lets me watch the white noise for an unbearable amount of time. It's a very annoying white noise. Also, I wonder if some channels send a sign-off sequence once they run out of content.
So neat! I've been thinking of something similar to this where content creators would join their content to form channels in the original sense of the word and users would browse much like how they would on a normal TV
My senior mother needs this. She doesn't use a computer, but does have a TV a firestick. I've tried showing her how to use the search of youtube but she is too use to how tv use to work and wants to channels to find something.
If this could be made into a firestick app or something and come with a recommendation system, allow some customization using topics instead of channel names and have them be editable and customized to different youtube interests - I would buy it
I love that this is a small amount of plain html and js, as I think the instinct for a lot of folks these days in creating this would have been to invest a lot of time in using the frameworks du jour.
This reminds me of Neverthink tv, which basically did the same thing except (recycling youtube videos into "tv channels") with heavy manual curation of content.
So it appears that OP is only using items off YouTube front page as options on channels? I think this would be a lot more interesting if it chose more randomized content, especially having an option for content with low views...
Also, an option to do full-screen would greatly enhance the experience.
I think the biggest issue that exists with current YouTube is that so much is crammed into the UI and viewing experience (Ads, the videos on the sidebar, clunky controls to skip videos, etc...) that ruins the continuity of video content, especially when mixed with so many videos in different formats... It's also the same problem that TikTok is fighting with, it makes for a pretty disruptive viewing experience in comparison to cable TV or just choosing to watch TV shows or movies instead.
This is awesome, it really gives you the feeling of flipping through channels and stopping up and just watch something random that you might not have otherwise.
Much of YouTubes potential is pretty much wasted, because of the monetization policy. It permeates the platform, even if you're a "Premium" subscriber. Rather than optimize for "engagement", it would be nice, even if it was a Premium feature, to be able to say: "I want to watch content that will help improve my health, teach me to become a better developer or "On Friday evening, I want long format retro computing content".
This is a great idea, I'd love to be able to use it on my TV. It would be nice if it also supported changing the playback speed to 1.5x, 2x etc - the youtube player has this so I'm assuming it's possible.
It's so refreshing to know that you don't have to watch everything. Go through the content, once you find something that you enjoy, watch it. Not worrying about what else you have to "watch later".
There's a project called DizqueTV[0] that lets you set up "channels" of media to be streamed to a Plex server, which then lets you send that onto a TV.
It's not quite the same as straight TV channels. But it's pretty close!
I know of https://ersatztv.org which I used a while ago. With a Kodi frontend you can play on TV. Not sure it does podcasts and music though but I used it successfully for movies and TV shows.
For music I setup a micro pc at my place connected to a radio transmitter. I have a music library on it and set it to shuffle. I can have normal radios around my house, tune to my station, and it’s always something I like with no commercials. I don’t have multiple stations to flip to, but that’s ok. I like the simplify of turning on a radio without having to pick what’s playing. I can also turn on multiple radios and it works just like those fancy setups for multi room music streaming at a fraction of the cost/complexity. Something like Sonos or AirPlay requires a lot to do what a radio could do decades ago.
The transmitter seems pretty weak, to maintain a legal status with the FCC, so some days it works better than others. I probably need to experiment with placement or other frequencies. I’m in a pretty congested area from that perspective. I found a website that suggests the best one based on the city a user us in and just went with that.
I wish there were reserved frequencies for personal use that would make home transmitters better to use. I have 0 hope for that now, but during the era of FM transmitters being popular in cars, it would have been nice if it had gotten some attention.
Great stuff, I really like it! As others mentioned, channel names, a channel list or a guide would help.
Also, if you're looking for new channel ideas: (british) game shows or talk shows!
I worked at Pluto TV pre-launch, and YouTube "live" crammed into channels was basically our app, with a scheduler system that allowed us to also render a channel guide.
Several years ago I spent a great deal of time thinking about how to create something like this, glad someone did it!
My vision went beyond this into allowing users to create their own channels (still only identifiable by a channel number) which would basically just be a playlist. I think a better idea now would be to have them add a list of channels and have it randomly play videos from only those channels and have that interrupted by anytime that channel is live streaming.
1) I only see static until I fiddle with the mute button, which makes the image work besides working as expected. As soon as I change channel, all static again until I hit mute. I'm on Chrome over Windows using a corporate network.
2) The info button shows a reasonable email address, and, under "Support", the string "bc1q4s2f6df2cqa8stenwp8y5tlmd5pywy8dwqqxvh". I have no idea what to do with that string.
I feel like the secret sauce to this is the fact that it drops you into the middle of a video. If it was just a queue of videos that play from start to end it wouldn't be as interesting. I cant believe Netflix hasnt added something like this for TV shows. Just drop you into something random and have a few basic categories to choose from. Its so much better for discovery than having to judge 100s of shows based on their thumbnail.
This scratched the right itch for me. Deciding what to watch is so difficult and this limits options in just the right way. It really does feel like TV. Good job!
Very neat. I like the channel idea. There’s also https://random-video.com which shows one of 4.5 Billion YouTube videos randomly (or with a filter for view count, language, year).
Pretty fun to discover what’s out there, without being influenced by YouTubes algorithm. It’s based on the YT Archive project and some other sources, since YT sadly has no randomize function.
Suddenly I see that tiktok and YouTube shorts and such are just new incarnation of chanel flipping mechanics. And I'm not sure if it's better all around.
Algorithm driven personalized YouTube videos playing from random moment with easy follow up with rewinding to see the whole thing or more from this creator or more like that would be awesome.
You can also be smart about where from start playing by using the hot moments information from YouTube.
I made the same thing a few years ago. Youtube embeds, react, socket.io and postgresql on a node.js server. I got the idea from poolside.fm's video player.
This is very cool! I've actually been working on something similar for some time as a feature on my website https://www.bingeclock.com. Can I ask if you've done something to minimize the number of banner ads Youtube pushes onto the screen? That has been a challenge for me and yours looks very clean! Awesome job!
Think the website is getting the HN hug of death; just static for me on every channel, but reminded me of a story:
Recently my sister was on a vacation with her family, and my two nephews were upstairs watching TV. They came down "Mom - The TV is broken!", she goes upstairs - working fine. 10 mins later it repeats, and repeats again.
Finally, she catches when the TV "breaks" ... it's a commercial, haha.
I understands what you're trying to replicate, but I believe this would distract from the charm since users could then just visit YouTube [directly] and search for things scheduled.
The randomness and uninterrupted playback is why this is so cool =D
I download videos and schedule them as channels with https://ersatztv.org/ to watch through Plex locally to get the same effect. I usually want some noise on the background and in that mode I can't be stopping frequently to choose the next video or mess with playlists.
I remember cobbling something like this together myself using a Kodi plugin called PseudoTV a number of years ago
Definitely a lot more usable from a browser for sure. I'd echo other comments that a TV guide style interface would be a fantastic addition that would take this from a "that's cool" to something I'd potentially regularly use.
This is amazing. It reminds me a little of betamaxmas[0]. I wish I could find a Christmas Channel! :)
It also occurs to me that there are a whole bunch of people here for whom this doesn't offer any nostalgia or memories, but is purely just a weird old affectation.
A physical selector dial for your faves would be nice.
I remember we had a chunky dial that required a lot of force (for me as a little kid) to turn from channel to channel. It had a bunch of channels (a dozen?) but I think there were only two channels broadcasting. (My Dad bought a B&W TV for us to watch the moon landings)
The shared reality, the shared experience of hearing and seeing things at the same time as others are listening, creating content... Radio and TV and theater give this to us, where hyper individual on demand feeds break it.
I hope society decides to retain some level of "over the air" information sharing that is synced.
I love this! Criterion Channel has a similar sort of function - a single, continuous channel (called 24/7) that plays curated movies from their collection. Did you curate the list of channels / videos?
Also, how is the noise generated? I know it's a tiny thing but it looks a bit repetitive / pseudorandom.
I love this. I've often thought about this type of interface for youtube and also beyond. Also, the same thing with audio, bringing a terrestrial radio type of experience to internet based audio content. Very cool to see someone taking actual steps and not just day dreaming. :)
This is super fun, but I hope the content creators are being compensated. Content creators work hard to produce this content under the assumption they will be paid for it (in one of many different potential channels but the HOW is less relevant).
There is a bug when using qutebrowser (using arch linux) - when turning on the sound, the TV turns off (e.g. goes to black-and-white-noise-mode). When turning off the sound, the TV turns on again.
On google chrome, all is well. Just for FYI :) very cool project!
In a way I feel TikTok taps into this type of TV-like discovery, where you are not overloaded with options but instead just swipe through channels until you find something you want to stop and watch.
The main benefit of TV was (and sometimes is, e.g. bbc if we ignore news) editioralized picking of programs. There was someone deciding if a video is worth watching (and in many cases acting in good faith).
was annoying that i couldn't find the source of the the video (i know you provide the id, but still), had to remove a couple of elements to be able to rightclick the video and copy the url at timestamp
Agreed, it is so clean and simple what @hadisafa did! In my version (https://tv.istasyon.app/) I made it more obvious instead of hiding title etc., I thought it would be more honest to the actual creator with a ref back.
Hey, this is great! Could you make it so clicking on the video ID in the bottom right corner opens the full video in a new tab? It would be nice to be able to like / save the whole video for later. Kinda like DVR.
It's a pretty good idea, but how are the videos picked? I flipped through all the channels and 11/12 was Americans talking (and the last one was sports). Would it be easy to be able to set the language?
Are those livestreams or videos? They seem like videos but if they would be livestreams it would be cool if you could speak to a livestream and then it would speech to text type it in the streamer's chatbox.
I like UIs like this when just one thing is in the focus....I think few years ago here on HN someone did something like this but for Twitch; where you could switch back and forth between live streamers which had only 1 viewer. This format is definitely good for fast and easy discovery.
This is what makes the experience for me. You can tell someone "check out channel 12" and you'll both be watching the same thing just like we used to do.
I see people asking the creator to add some data about the channels, but i think this is intended to mimic traditional TV, where they didn't have any information other than what the producers put on screen.
Very cool. A lot to be said for jumping right in to the action.
This is a perfect demonstration of that "law" that states you can skip the first 30% of a YouTube video and not miss much.
So, the content in this test is all TV production content as far as I can see. I reckon this would really hit it’s strides once it was changing through content actually produced just for You Tube.
How many years do you think it would take, and how powerful a computer would you need before you could switch Youtube channels as fast as channels on a regular analog TV from the 1960's?
This is what YouTube TV should have been. Google is blowing it. They have an unlimited collection of high-quality content, for free, just begging to be organized into channels.
Love this. Good quality video and low latency. The content? Well, can't please everybody. I was looking for cartoons, any cartoon. No dice. That would be great addition.
There's something cool about knowing that other people are all watching the same thing at the same time. Sports are really the only thing that give that feel now a days.
This is interesting. Maybe this could help bring back some long form tv, which in my opinion is better than watching TikTok which consumes our dwindling attention span
It seems like random videos are being played from many years ago and/or getting live feeds of some stations. Does everyone get the same selection of channel feeds?
Just got addicted to Ch 12 which is a bunch of interviews and talk shows. Never knew this was what I was missing to go off in the background at an isolated work place.
Is there a way to embed this? I use Obsidian and want to capture this for historical sake and when I want to go back to it I can search for it on my hard drive.
This is so wonderful, thank you. Please don't change anything about it (except making the explanation of the channels available in the site's info panel)!
This is awesome! How are the videos being chosen? Without any monetization, I guess we shouldn't expect anything more than a loop of the same videos, right?
I guess what I'm getting at is, we shouldn't expect this hand-picking to continue indefinitely, since this isn't a paid service. I'm guessing the playlists will start to loop before too long?
My vote is to _not_ let the features creep in. Keep it simple. Make a more advanced one at a different address or something. The beauty here is the simplicity,.
Not having the algo recommendations but with your curation is also amazing. I’ll need to pin this to my tv app folder to remember to try it on the big screen.
Love it! This is a brilliant example of how removing choice actually make the product so much better. If this was an app on a Apple TV I would actually use it
This amazing and great! I absolutely hate having to choose something to watch from an immensive infinite list, specially when I'm just trying to relax.
I love this! This is how I want to watch stuff sometimes, very relaxing to take away all the functionality and (mental) noise that comes with it. Thanks.
One of the keys to the success of this thing is not letting it become infested with advertisements. The desire to monetise will be almost irresistible.
This is cool and really well done, I'm kinda blown away. Would love to hear from the creator on what inspired them and how they designed and made it retro yet also minimal and so smooth. It's been awhile since I saw something so well polished!
Imagine if it also included to an index channel like the old Cable TV Guide programming schedule screen, with the blue background and time slot cells. Some versions of this even had a PIP (Picture-in-Picture) sort of capability.
Perhaps you like this nostalgic TV as well then: https://90s.myretrotvs.com. It also uses Youtube as a source and plays uninterrupted like an old-school channel.
This seems like it'd be great to have playing at an old folks home. I know my grandparents watch the Johnny Carson/Tonight Show channel for a taste of their old culture
It's unpleasant because of the repeating patterns, IMHO. If it actually looked like NTSC or PAL snow it'd be quite nifty.
That's probably one of those things that's harder to generate dynamically than it sounds like it would be, though. Perlin noise might be the right approach.
I miss that aspect of the tv experience, something live streamers do still except that it’s just them playing a game, rambling or doing porn. This is far more diverse
video speed controller extension is automatically speeding up the video for me and I can't change it back on this website (due to the invisible divs covering everything I think)
Maybe you realize this (or not), but each channel is comprised of YouTube videos streaming from Youtube. This website is a very well done, clever front-end. But it doesn't host or stream any video.
Copy the ID of any of the channels and you can bring up the source video on YouTube by adding it to the YouTube URL after the ?.
this is great but I wish I could customize or disable the flashing between channel changes, it's really strobe effectish when changing quickly and hard on my eyes
I noticed you have a BTC address listed. I showed your app to my friends and one of them who doesn't have an HN account asked if you have a "Solana" address.
I've also noticed that when I did my version of this app more than 3 years ago (https://tv.istasyon.app). Somehow the ads are limited or gone if you play videos as embedded. At some point, I thought YouTube had fixed that but seemingly not. The easiest way to do it is to find the YouTube video URL and replace that part `/watch?v=` with `/embed/`, then voila!
This is what will replace tiktok: Television. Having to scroll down or swipe is just so tiresome, it leaves marks on the screen and ... who cares if i have to wait for a crap video to end , maybe there s something good after that. We are going to come full circle
Perhaps the ideia of a back-end was the video selection, so everyone watches the same videos.
But there could also be a video list in the source code, or maybe, but less likely, a deterministic usage of yt's algorithm
Damn, I realized the thing I like the most about this is I can be disappointed. There can legitimately be "nothing on", and then I can go and do something else to come back later. I think the most apparent way algorithms have messed with my head is teaching me there is always something on. So I keep wasting sometimes upto an hour just to find something. In the end I end up watching something I had already seen anyways.
This is really, really cool, but I'm a little disappointed that there's no credit for the channel / video you're watching when you click on the (i) icon—only a link to your own credit. I think if you're going to credit yourself, you have a moral obligation to credit the people who made the content you're highlighting as well.
Judging from the enthusiasm from HN toward this in general, it seems like I'm in the minority in that I hate this experience. I was born in '87, for reference. Channel flipping always frustrated me, and I haven't had TV hooked up in my house in well over a decade - the TV is for youtube/streaming media only.
It seems flipping away is effectively a downvote, stating to watch is effectively an upvote. I’m not sure why we feel like everything needs to be actively voted on these days.
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?
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.
You can probably do the audio fix systemwide with EasyEffects.
> 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.
What are these tools? That sounds super useful for the most annoying YouTube flaws I run into
If you're on Windows 10+ then there's a mono audio toggle in the Windows accessibility settings. I use it all the time to fix this exact issue.
Also in any other major OS afaik. It's a standard accessibility feature.
* https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv
* https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
* https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink
* https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock
* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
* https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
Did I miss any, chat?
https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube Is great for chromecasts and other google tv boxes. Basically newpipe, but in a tv format.
If you want to use sponsorblock with newpipe, use the tubular fork instead https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
That's super complicated lol. Why not use the browser extension or accessibility feature?
That's not super complicated.
I have carla running at all times and put all of my system audio through various loopback devices (browser, voice conferencing, and music/system) and then apply varying degrees of compression to them (no surprise sounds, hard limiting to hear quiet people, and bypass -- respectively).
Of course everything goes through an extra limiter at the end to avoid clipping.
I also send the voice conferencing input and output through RNNoise, so I can avoid emitting terrible sounds and avoid hearing them as well.
People also seem to like me better when I cut my mids a little bit, but additional research is required.
The reason for this is that I can change browsers (or games or voice apps) and they all think I'm just using a normal mic and headset, but it's actually like 10 LSP plugins and various routing.
Still doesn't feel that complicated when you do a little bit at a time.
Yes, that does seem super complicated compared to the plug and play setup 99.9% of people are using.
So you got velcro shoes too I take it?
i love your spirit and it's interesting to read how you handle your sound, but it's almost comical to see someone describe using 10 freaking plugins to handle sound as 'not super complicated' :D
> People also seem to like me better when I cut my mids a little bit, but additional research is required.
Instead of digitally recreating your voice so people like you more, have you considered getting some psychotherapy? Maybe? :/
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.
>> Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.
That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.
I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.
Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)
"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."
This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...
"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."
This is personal experience, but it is the personal experience of my specialist telling me. [1] is some less anecdotal information on the subject. My use of the term "game over" was specifically for audible speech interpretation.
Lip reading is indeed something I'll probably need to get better at into my mid-30s and beyond as things continue to degrade. My hearing loss is low-frequency-first (Meniere's Disease [2]).
[1] https://www.cochlear.com/au/en/home/diagnosis-and-treatment/...
[2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/menieres-dise...
I was diagnosed with "glue ear" as a young child, which I don't think any doctor admits to these days! I had two lots of grommet related operations which involved inserting tiny plastic hollow cylinders into my eustachian tubes, to try and widen them. After a couple of years they were removed by a doctor with a sort of hooked probe. So two lots of treatment spanning around six years. That was in the seventies.
I remember being put into a sound proof booth and wearing headphones and being played pure tones from a generator and being told to press a button when I heard the tones. With hindsight, tinnitus would have played merry hell with those tests, especially at the frequencies they seemed to concentrate on. Yes, my memory is fine!
Did the treatment help? Probably not. I recall what the sounds of tinnitus were as a very young child and they are same now.
Since around aged 45 (I'm 53 now) I have experienced brief spinning/dizzy spells. I find them quite easy to counter. I first noticed them whilst wearing skis which was a bit disconcerting.
Having read up on your link to "Meniere's Disease" - that's probably what I ... have, for want of a better word. However, the dizzy spells for me are transitory and not certainly not minutes or hours.
I gave up smoking around six years ago after 30 odd years tabbing. That probably doesn't help either.
My point is that your faculties are very complicated and the science is somewhat lacking. Putting a name to a basket of symptoms may not even be helpful in our case. I am a (was) a really good swimmer but diving below around two metres deep used to really hurt unless I gently worked down and popped my ears.
In the end I think I have mild symptoms compared to many but I don't have many people to compare notes with. What becomes normal over years and decades hides a lot of things.
Based on my personal experience, you will automatically get better at lip reading or deducing what is going on via body language etc. I also have to wear glasses ...
Anyway, I wish you all the best and hope you find a way to live with whatever conditions you have. We have a surprisingly impressive array of sensors and back end processing gear. The eyes are amazing in being able to scan a scene with a tiny aperture and the brain to stitch together a very accurate scenario of what is where and doing what. Touch and all the rest are available, all the time. The next time you catch a ball, pick up a pen, kiss the missus/husband or whatever, remind yourself of how amazing that is, and you are.
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...
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.
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.
>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.
Is it really possible that there's no driver that is capable of doing this in Windows? Did you look into this?
I wouldn't know because I consider all those effect libraries, mixers and presets ("Concert Hall" - who would ever want that?) that usually come with the audio chipset driver suite as bloatware and try to get rid of them, or at least never touch them - but it would surprise me if there weren't anything that affects the amount of stereo separation...?
I haven't looked into it, no (and certainly not on Windows!). It wouldn't surprise me at all if there's already readily available software that does exactly this. Even my phone has a bunch of options for altering the sound, including something called "DTS:X 3D Surround".
> 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.
Me neither, I also only use my headphones. I've only had to use mono mode on amateur youtube videos where one of the audio channels is just missing. It has never been an issue on big productions.
Perhaps they're using a weird media player?
This is incredible and I want this on my TV, hooked up to my remote for exactly this experience.
>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).
If you are using windows, it allows you to switch sound to mono
iOS and macOS too, found in accessibility settings.
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.
Compared to what? It's easily the best Internet cable TV product on the market IMHO.
It’s an odd “in between” between classic TV and YouTube itself.
If you want to watch “the most likely thing you would want to watch” (NFL, Olympics main feed), YouTubeTV is great.
But as soon as you want to find something off the top few recommendations, it gets much harder. Compare that to regular TV, when I could just remember 27 is Discovery Channel and get there instantly.
The answer is pretty obvious. They don't want people remembering the content producers. Same reason they've worked so hard to kill the subscription feed on YouTube. They want you to rely on their recommendation engine.
It worked great on an ipad but on a TV app I had to go click, click, click, click 40 times to get to the channel I wanted.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
Regarding sound, if you are on a Mac you can use Audio Hijack to made the sound do anything you want.
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
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.
The best part of this is the channel doesn't pause when you flip away from it. It is always "running" and if you flip away you will miss it. That builds in a FOMO trade-off which causes user to automatically/subconciously decide on channel they most want to watch, because they can't watch everything.
yeah when i noticed this, it blew my mind.
channels are synced so everyone is watching the same exact content at the same time, just like TV.
Yep this works really nicely, and psychologically it's somehow way more relaxing than having to curate what you watch
I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon. Since it will also allow them to do a Spotify-style payola approach to scheduling.
> I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon.
I doubt it would. The modern style of binging on-demand streaming content seems to be too effective at capturing attention. Remember that lots of people get notifications on their phone the instant a new video comes out for a subscribed channel, especially kids and teens who haven't developed resistance to these business models.
YT would be unlikely to spend any effort implementing an alternate mode that doesn't capture attention as effectively; the old model of live channels is likely a niche preference. If somehow this did prove to be more effective at capturing attention, I could see it being implemented, but that would surprise me.
well they already have youtube shorts, which is kinda similar.
I hate that if anytime I upload a short video it forces the video to YouTube shorts. Especially since I’m not making content for the public - it’s more a demo video or something to specifically send to a few people. As with so many services nowadays, I like the ability to use YouTube shorts when I want, but I hate that it’s forced upon us with no reasonable and consistent method to not use shorts at the users discretion.
Uploading horizontally or >1m should fix this?
Most things or demos I send are horizontal, but I agree, the automatic shorts of vertical is annoying
But that triggers an immediate tiktok dopamine chase. I immediately want to judge what I'm seeing and swipe to move on. I start wondering about the ML training on my every move and hesitation. It's restless
Along the same lines, I have a near-terabyte of videos I have downloaded from Youtube, of my own vast and multivariate interests, and having it on random, with a simple pause/next/prev-style interface, is also a compelling viewer-experience equillibrium akin to the sets of yore ..
(cue Buggles..)
I have long wanted Netflix to offer this feature. Just give me a random episode of a low stakes sitcom. Seinfeld, SVU, whatever.
My other wishlist item was that Netflix would offer a “shuffle” this series option. For standalone episodic shows, ordering does not matter, and it is a bunch of overhead to pick something.
I didn't realize how much I would appreciate shuffle until i started using jellyfin.
I use it all the time for shows that have self-contained episodes (e.g. Futurama).
Netflix offered this in France back in 2020[0], but appeared to have removed it in 2022[1].
0: https://www.vulture.com/2020/11/netflix-linear-channels-dire... 1: https://www.numerama.com/pop-culture/1273686-netflix-direct-...
>I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon
I highly doubt it. They're going to wait for competitors to implement it and have it for several years before they bother to poorly copy the idea.
They experimented with it for a bit last year. I think Linus talked about it on the WAN show, and for a while LTT had it enabled on their channel.
It was essentially a 24/7 livestream which played from their back catalogue, with the ability to add "promo" segments in between videos, which they used for products on their merch store.
Seemed to dissapear around the same time the whole monoblock scandal and production shutdown happened last year, so I'm not sure if the YouTube experiment also concluded or if they turned it off during the shutdown.
I added ErsatzTV to my Plex setup about a month ago and we honestly love it so much. I've got 2 sitcom channels, British panel shows, Taskmaster, all Star Trek all the time, British sitcoms, cartoons, and a few others.
Its really nice to just sit down and watch "whatever is on" (even though I could switch over to the main library and watch any episode I want).
Sometimes I just want a 0-effort/0-decision background noise while I work on something else or browse on my phone.
I've done the same thing with dizqueTv for my grandmother. On her Android TV, I was able to integrate the IPTV channels on the same channels list, so she can simply use the remote to navigate between the digital channels and the IPTV channels (30 for Hercule Poirot, 31 for classic B&W movies, etc.)
dizqueTv, ErsatzTV... these are the "Chinese company names on Amazon" of TV app names.
No clue about dizqueTV, but ErsatzTV is German for tv replacement/substitute :-) so it has a little more meaning then the Chinese Amazon names ;-)
Ersatz is also a perfectly cromulent English word [0]
[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ersatz
I've also been using ErsatzTV with my jellyfin setup. It can take a while to setup channels how you want them, but I love my sci-fi channel which is going through all the Star Treks, Stargates, and Twilight Zones.
It is so much easier to flip it on to my Sci-fi Channel, animation channel, movie channel, or James Bond marathon channel then to decide what to watch. And since I've seen all this content, it is often kinda nice to start in the middle of an episode.
I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps that I use as some filler content if I want episodes to start on the hour.
I've been thinking a lot about setting up some kids channels with specific hours (like channel comes on at 7am, goes off during part of the day, comes back on in the afternoon, and goes offline at bedtime) for my siblings kids, as I think letting them just browser youtube kids is terrible.
> I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps
Where were you able to find these? Recreating one of these channels has been a side project I’ve wanted to do for ages.
I think it was mostly youtube and retrojunk.com
Try searching for "$channel bump"
Personally, I think Adult Swim had the best bumps, usually just some nice house music with a nice animation and some funny quotes.
I'm really interested in this but I'm having trouble googling. What is a bump? Is it referring to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(broadcasting)
Yup. Here's a playlist for adult swim ones. I just used yt-dlp and passed in the playlist URL and it will download all the bumps as separate files:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS8kchdwFPM&list=PL075thqiB6...
There's a torrent going around the usual places that has every [as] bump from the launch of the network to whenever they last updated the archive (a few months ago in my case.)
Do you know if that can operate with no transcoding?
I’ve designed my media set-up around Jellyfin on a weak server that can’t handle transcoding, and very-capable clients that don’t need it. This lets me avoid like half the bugs on the Jellyfin bug tracker and all the instability an Nvidia or AMD video card would introduce to the server itself.
I’m very interested in this, but can’t use it if it must transcode.
No, it must transcode to work correctly, which can be a problem for me too (although I just have an intel card and use vaapi).
I believe there is a container you can use where it doesn't transcode, but it trips up every player I have tried, as they do not like having different resolutions/codecs suddenly swap.
Damn, kinda what I figured. Thanks. Maybe some day I’ll upgrade/downgrade to a less perfectly-stable server that is transcoding capable.
What CPU?
Intel Quicksync is very capable (even more so than most AMD/Nvidia cards) and any 7th gen or newer Intel CPU with integrated graphics has it and has good codec support.
It’s an old used Lenovo workstation. It has a some kind of quad-core Intel processor but can’t usefully transcode from h.265 at all (no hardware support, I assume) and is bad at most other codecs at resolutions above 720p or so. Even transcoding within its limits seems to tax it, so I doubt it could maintain two transcodes at once in any case—we sometimes have three streams going, or one or two plus someone playing on its Minecraft server, and it can keep up with all that just fine, but transcoding’s out.
I’ve even seen it turn into a slideshow remuxing original video with transcoded audio. It’s not very capable.
Ahh probably a Xeon CPU, they don't have an iGPU.
I was checking out their docs and ran across this option for channels:
> HLS Direct does not transcode content and can perform better on low power systems, but does not support watermarks and some clients will have issues at program boundaries
Sounds like that might be what you’re looking for?
ErsatzTV is amazing. It’s actually excellent for settings up kids channels. You can configure start and end times and select a pool of content/shows/movies to pick from.
One nifty feature is that you can configure “filler” content to inject randomly between episodes. I used this to add short educational clips from a kids TV channel in the Middle East.
I've been using Quasi TV (android app) to try out the concept. I remember having something similar back in the boxee / xbmc days. I especially liked that it "just worked" without having to set anything up besides pointing it at my plex. I'm not afraid of hosting something, but I didn't want to go through the trouble if it turned out I wasn't going to use it.
I quite like it. Unfortunately, the app's been a bit buggy - not always picking up the stream at the "current time" and sometimes navigation gets wonky. But it was a good test run and that, along with your post, has convinced me to give Ersatz (or something like it) a try.
Another observation: with this setup, you essentially randomly jump into the middle of videos, skipping what is usually the most grating part of the show: the intro.
In the intro to most shows/videos, there's annoying jingles, silly animations, a redundant summary of what's about to happen in an already short segment, or just useless chatter "hey guys! it's your boy, _. welcome to my channel, remember to smash that like button, we have a great show today".
Because of all this intro bloat, I tend to jump a few minutes into most YouTube videos by default.
The only thing worse than the intro is the 2nd intro. Just get to the GD content please.
This was the first thing I noticed, too. It's amazing how much better it is, simply leaving off all that "what's up guys" introduction.
It's no longer functional, but in the past if you appended the parameter t=wadsworth to a YouTube URL it would skip the first 30% of a video.
I don't see how this is a good thing. It's a totally artificial constraint. It's already impossible to watch everything on youtube. I don't want software I use to instill fear as a design goal, detached from any of the outcomes of user actions.
Because like TV, when you're watching something, you know other people are watching exactly the same thing. And that's pretty cool.
The FOMO would only work if the content was exclusively available during that livestream, and not re-posted later.
That being said, I think the last thing society needs is to make these platforms more addictive. The algorithms already do a good enough job of keeping us glued.
If only we had a TiVo...
> It is always "running" and if you flip away you will miss it.
Throw in some ads and it will be everything I hate about broadcast TV.
That is what it was like in the 90s! Although you could use your VCR to record the other channel.
I use Pluto for this. Quick download, no sign up required, and tons of topic-specific channels to switch to. I put it on all my devices and don't even worry about it.
Google TV also has a "Live" tab that collects all the live channels across all your apps and puts it into a TV guide grid. I've installed Fubo and Tubi and others just to build out my TV guide.
Works pretty well.
I was part of Pluto's launch team. We used to literally just be 95% YouTube embeds that were forced into a live-like experience client-side. Getting simple YouTube or even HTML5 video API calls to work reliably in 2013 was quite a feat. Loads of people still had Flash, mobile browsers were a crapshoot, and I caused many many thousands of early Amazon Fire TV hard restarts due to crashing their (kernel?) video decoder somehow.
Fun times.
Each channel displays the video code for the YouTube video its playing so if you see something interesting you can easily access the video. I really like this as a curated discovery tool, there is something up flipping thru channels and catching something at just the right time to peak your interest that viewing a clickbaity thumbnail and video title just can't replicate.
Similarly I find I sometimes enjoy listening to the radio more than Spotify because I don't feel forced to min/max my enjoyment. I have to listen to whatever is on.
This is something I always wonder... Something that I really miss from TV on internet content (YouTube, movie streamings and so on) is turn it on and watching what's being transmitted without thinking about what I wanna see.
Three reasons:
1. Picking something to watch takes time. Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I'm dining alone. My meal gets cold before I start the video
2. Choosing something to watch is stressful. If I'm tired and I don't know what I want to see makes me more tired and frustrated. These are the times that I don't want the freedom to watch I want because they are the times that I don't want to think about what I want
3. The random factor of watching something that I would never watch by myself it's something that makes me go outside my bubble. I can't say how many good movies (or songs, etc) I found by that randomness
I'm not against the freedom of streaming services but there are moments that I just don't want that freedom. So, thank you!
Why can't you pick randomly from your home page and let auto play do its thing?
The recommendation algorithms suggests things that are related to what I watched before. And I still need to choose one of the options that it recommends.
They recently introduced an anonymous mode
Yeah, for me loading the homepage and clicking the top-left video is almost an automatic reflex at this point.
I wish my YouTube recommendations were anywhere good enough to do this.
Agreed, my recommendations are extremely narrow. Usually videos from the same three content creators, and ones that I've already seen or in there chronological queue that I already plan to watch.
This works pretty well for YT when it knows your preferences, but for streaming TV services like Netflix I find it's a box of chocolates full of shit. It's just going to be whatever is being "promoted" at the time and has the most widespread appeal, not something interesting.
> Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I'm dining alone.
I think the YouTube recommendation algorithm you get from opening the app or viewing the front page is good for this. They have a lot of random content and when the algorithm gets to know you, it will suggest things of interest that can be consumed this way.
I have so many subscriptions on youtube that the home recommendation is actually a quicker way to find something interesting if I have limited time, since the subscriptions are full of shorts and 'reruns' now where creators try to monetize old videos in new ways.
The only issue is that my youtube is the one on the main tv, so sometimes the suggestions get messed up when my kids watch. Youtube probably has a really confusing set of conflicting beliefs about who I am.
My kids mostly watch on tablets which are their own. On the TV, they have separate profiles on all the streaming apps. We don't do YouTube much on TV but when we do, I've always been sure to give them a different device that is not logged into my account.
If I lend them a device to watch YouTube I usually do it in the browser in incognito.
My youtube recommendations on my laptop are just short videos(all are below 3 mins with a few exceptions ;-;) I get so much better recommendations by using youtube tv but it sucks that they don't let us switch preferences. But well results in me spending less time on youtube so a win heh
YT is the best choice for something random for a small amount of time, but is absolutely maimed at the free-tier by 2 leading ads requiring 1+ user interactions to skip.
I can't easily press 'skip' with a plate of pasta in one hand and a fork in another, and I don't want to watch two 2:30 leading ads, so I guess I'll just go somewhere else.
The solution to a lot of those is to just have a goto show that you watch. Before netflix removed The Office, that is what I always did when wanting something to watch while eating a snack on the couch or to have noise on in the background. I'd just fire up netflix and resume whatever episode it was last one.
We ditched cable forever ago, but I do find that I miss just watching 15 minutes of some random show like I used to. I usually forget about it until I'm at someone's house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.
> The solution to a lot of those is to just have a goto show that you watch.
Cool! I have a list of movies to watch that I write from several recommendations sources, so I can try focus in watching instead of choosing. I can't say the same about music, I'm stuck for years hearing almost the same bands, which is kinda sad...
> I usually forget about it until I'm at someone's house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.
Another good point, watching something that I don't need to pay too much attention because I don't care about the subject, but can entertain me while I do other things... Here in Brazil that kind of shows that "we watch, we like but we don't know why" is a recurring joke, and we have three main ones: one about farming (Globo Rural), one about fishing (Pesca Alternativa) and one about trucks (Siga Bem Caminhoneiro)
>Here in Brazil that kind of shows that "we watch, we like but we don't know why" is a recurring joke, and we have three main ones: one about farming (Globo Rural), one about fishing (Pesca Alternativa) and one about trucks (Siga Bem Caminhoneiro)
Are those public access type shows that are meant to be somewhat educational?
They are public access. Globo Rural for example is broadcasted every sunday morning. It's well produced, and its calm pace, its opening theme and the farming landscapes makes us feel good vibes. It fits perfectly the moment of waking up in the weekend, without having thinking about work and just chilling while we drink a coffee
> I can't say the same about music, I'm stuck for years hearing almost the same bands, which is kinda sad...
I like SiriusXM for this. I'm often finding new channels to listen to, and once I pick a channel I don't have to pick out songs.
Apple Music has some features that can work similarly, such as radio stations (though a lot of theirs are really more like podcasts) or they have lots of playlists of recommended hits from different genres and you can shuffle them.
WHY is there not an "I'm feeling lucky" button for streaming services. Akin to "give me anything," though, I suspect the answer is the more time spent scrolling, the less data has to be streamed over the wire, so it's cheaper.
More likely it is the inverse: Selecting a random video at scale is the costly problem.
You can certainly fake it as a workaround. For example, you'll notice that "I'm feeling lucky" on Google simply follows the first search result. Streaming services could take what is already computed as the first result on the "Home" page and use that, for example.
But at that point why not just click on the first video? Unlike Google, which doesn't give you much until you enter a search query, all of the streaming services I know of have already given you your "lucky" matches by the time a "I'm feeling lucky button" could be presented. Two buttons side-by-side that do the exact same thing doesn't offer much.
Users probably don’t want a random video, they want a video which is from the smaller subset of videos they were already likely to enjoy.
The reason that might be preferable to just clicking the first result is that the second actually involves a choice since you’ve seen the second item.
You're going to see the second item no matter what, unless streaming services give up showing any videos on initial interaction. But I expect that really is the best user interface for most users.
> More likely it is the inverse: Selecting a random video at scale is the costly problem.
if that feature existed it would never be a random video from all the available videos. It'd be a random-seeming video from a carefully curated selection of videos that youtube wants to push at certain users, and in some cases were paid to promote. Users wouldn't know and wouldn't care anyway because they pushed a button and got content without thinking.
That all makes sense and I never really considered the selection of the video being the costly problem at scale. Thanks!
The only response I have is that purposefully-clicking the 'random' button has a psychological effect over clicking the first video returned which (gut check) makes me think it will be more easily tolerated if it ends up being "off-beat" since I didn't explicitly click the first selection (thus choosing it).
Netflix had a shuffle button. It wasn’t popular so they dropped it. It didn’t feel the same as this at all.
> the more time spent scrolling, the less data has to be streamed over the wire, so it's cheaper.
Google doesn't make money by avoiding sending streaming data; they make money by showing ads, which (mostly) aren't shown while you're scrolling.
I hadn't watched actual television for years. Then, in a visit to my parents house, I randomly got to watch a band in a talkshow that later became a band that I love.
What I am really missing is a "Play random episode" or "Randomize episodes" button on TV shows. I want to just flip on Seinfeld or Family Guy and watch random episodes, not in order. Such a missed opportunity for Netflix, etc.
Jellyfin has this. Very nice feature for comedy shows.
Part of that is because of the trend from the past few years (ever since Lost I believe but there's probably previous like soap operas) that TV shows are continuous. But even the 90's TV shows would have some continuity, referencing previous events. That said, I've been rewatching Star Trek DS9 (and may do so with Stargate as well) and the main overarching plot beats often happen at the start and end of a season, the episodes in between can often be randomised.
Sitcoms solve this. Just watch your favourite one again.
For Seinfeld fans, there's one site streaming it 24/7: WatchSeinfeld.net.
How strange, I’m the complete opposite. I’d never go back to letting corporates dictate how I engage with content; I even avoid recommender algorithms for the same reason. Being able to choose is so valuable to me.
>I’d never go back to letting corporates dictate how I engage with content
You do realize that the search function is literally that?
The entire way those platforms work is literally that. Ironically TV didn't dictate how to engage with content because there was not much. Compared to comment sections algorithmically boosting trolls to make you compulsively comment
I’m both, at times I don’t want to choose, at times I want full control. I didn’t have TV for years (was pushing a decade), but ~2months ago I got myself an analog antenna that has local channels and it’s been a blast: I caught some olympic games, watched Euro cup, couple of movies (I caught “Decision to leave” from my watchlist——tremendous movie), I saw some Anthony Bourdain shows and now I know who the guy is and i enjoyed the show, saw a documentary on war in my country, watched some live streams of city council meetings… Also, I wanted to say this somewhere in this thread I’m not trying to sell tv to you, you caught a stray bullet, but also I’m sharing that I watched it with a different curiosity after so long of not having it, and did have a great time just with those 17 channels of uncurated content, which was the main motivation——to have uncurated content
Exactly. I go out of my way to try to make sure that the content is consume is "pulled" and not "pushed" as much as possible. I'm happy to take genuine recommendations from actual people, but I don't care what companies want me to see or listen to, and I resent it when they limit my options to try to force my hand.
I think there's merit in both. One thing that is lost from choosing what you want to watch is that you don't get surprised anymore unless you want to be surprised, whereas with traditional TV you'd encounter things you didn't expect, or come across a movie you never heard of before. I think there's space for both.
Or to make another analogy, if you go out and sit at a bench, who knows what will pass by?
> Being able to choose is so valuable to me.
I agree, but sometimes I just don't want to choose because I don't have enough time or I'm to tired to do it
I miss channel surfing (a little). But from when the cable box was a dumb pipe and the picture would switch near instantaneously. The 3 seconds between channels in the last couple of decades was super obnoxious to me.
Yeah, digital TV feels like a step back in that regard, but on the other hand it makes you reconsider switching / browsing channels. And of course the advantage is higher image quality and more channels.
Get Plex. There's a ton of free live streaming channels for a ton of tastes and genres. Some of them I think to myself "This should have been a steaming channel years ago".
Why do you need Plex for that?
Why are you stressed about what to select, when it is guaranteed that any selection you make will be better than something a network would select for you to watch? Just pick anything.
Cause the energy spent paying attention to the show is non-zero, and ideally I get _some_ enrichment out of what I watch.
Channel 1: Science and Technology
Channel 2: Travel and Events
Channel 3: Food
Channel 4: Architecture
Channel 5: Film and Animation
Channel 6: Documentaries
Channel 7: Comedy
Channel 8: Music
Channel 9: Autos and Vehicles
Channel 10: News and Politics
Channel 11: UFC
Channel 12: Podcasts/Interviews/Talk Shows
This is what I was looking for, where did you see that info?
I think they built it. :)
I made the thing :)
May be you could put it up in the site too
This is such a neat project that you made!
Local 58?
This is a good idea for this app, but maybe the least realistic part of the old TV experience. You'd have maybe 3 "premium" channels of a mix of tv shows, news, talk shows, sports. Maybe a dedicated sports channel and dedicated news channel. A channel more biased towards educational shows. A channel or two of weird low-budget shows (local access). A few channels that don't come in well (static and distortion). And add some off-air "colorbars" sometimes. And a channel or two in a foreign language.
And then force the user to get off the couch and walk to the monitor to turn a knob when you want to change channel...
It's more like SiriusXM than broadcast TV, and I would say the SiriusXM model is a lot nicer. I like being able to choose a topic.
Would love a few more sports channels, a local news channel based on your location, and maybe a video gaming channel.
This project is very cool. Amazing execution. Other channels I would suggest:
Also diy and maker channel. Just add voidlabs, mitxela, some other makers Colin furze, adam savage and some woodworking channels, like four eyes furniture. Some metalworkers like inheritance machining. Just general creative engineering stuff but not documentaries.
Thinking back to childhood it was all History Channel, PBS, and Cartoon Network / Nick. Would be great to see analogues to some of those :)
It'd be really awesome to have a link to the channel and video that is playing in case I want to find it later. This is a wonderful discovery tool, but I'd really love to be able to save the content I discover!
On the bottom right there is an ID that looks like a YouTube video ID
Build that into the TV Guide!
I need this as a Roku app ASAP ;-;
One channel I always appreciate wherever I go, is the low budget non-profit hobby regional channel.
Would love to see people just working on projects they have around the house, not taking things too serious.
I just wasted the last 2hrs watching instead of working and I have not even made it past Channel 8. Thank God there're only 12 channels, I was afraid they would find me dead from starvation at my workstation in about a week's time.
Great. Can you elaborate a little on how channels are populated? Do you search YT for tags and order by most recent videos first? Or do you do some manual curation?
I'm curious here too, I only flipped through your channels for a minute, but found something interesting immediately.
I go to youtube and seem to run out of quality quickly. I even went as far as crawling the HN frontpage for videos - see hacker news TV - https://xiliary.com/bck/hn-tv.html
Going through your comments I see that you answered this elsewhere, and said that videos are handpicked [0]. Congrats for the dedication this implies!
So now my question is, how do you imagine this will work going forward? Do you plan on selecting more videos indefinitely, or are you working on some search system?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41248008
Channels really should go from 2-13 instead, but this is awesome.
Why is this? In my country they start at 1.
What’s wrong with channel 1?
In North America there was no channel 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_1_(North_American_TV)
Old school TV dials went from 2 to 13.
I'll never understood why Netflix, Hulu and others haven't done something similar to this. It's a much more natural way of "finding out" what you want to see. Create a bunch of channels based on existing tags or categories, have thing playing on a schedule, and allow me to zap through.
Bonus points if you allow me to zap as efficiently as I was able to back when we had analog TVs and cable. I was the master zapper, zapping through hundreds of channels in seconds. Just buffer the adjacent channels and calculate the maximum input latency.
Instagram tried this with IGTV. I actually liked the format too but they did shutdown due to lack of interest https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17484436/instagram-igtv-v...
Likely from a lack of engaging longform content on IG. Who wants to watch a continuous reel of mind-numbing shorts for hours. Youtube has enough quality content to make a more compelling product in this format
I used to love this chrome extension back in the day, unsure if it still works but same idea:
https://ottoplay.tv/
My guess would be that the primary users would keep it on as background noise in some room or another, and it would take a significant amount of data for comparatively little benefit.
How is the cost any different than “binging” a series kept on as background noise?
If this new feature would cost the streaming companies more money, they just need to tweak the business model or subscription pricing to cover it.
There was a startup called RheoTV started by ex-Apple people that did exactly that and it didn't work out.
There was also something called NeverThink that had the same fate.
I think this is the reason why "shorts" , or tiktok style videos work. I think YT shorts does this in a way, where you get a snippet of a long video as a shorts
The streaming service Shudder has it and it's one of my favorite features on any streaming platform.
Well done. My team built this at Disney six years ago when we were trying to solve content discovery problems. The problem with endless carousels of thumbnails is that it really doesn't draw you in. Sometimes you just need to drop people into content like it's channel surfing.
Netflix tried something similar a few years ago, but in my opinion it missed a critical ingredient, which was dropping people into the middle of content at a compelling point.
Really like the execution here. YouTube take note.
Can you give any insight into why these projects were canceled at Disney or Netflix?
I can't speak to Netflix. At Disney the willingness to experiment with streaming UX was thin on the ground six years ago. It was about making something that felt like a direct Netflix competitor. Other experiments have shipped since then, like co-viewing.
I actually believe TikTok is more of the spiritual inheritor of this kind of project more than any other platform.
I guess what I am trying to ask is why was UX research "thin on the ground" (lovely expression, never heard it before). Was it a profit loss thing or more like the progress wasn't fast enough
could that be solved by finding and using the 'most replayed' mark timestamps for each video and using that to find the best start points for each video
Uhm, only if this mark doesn't get affect by it being streamed here or it was be less relevant later.
Depends on the content and how it tends to be consumed. That might work for YouTube but maybe not, say, Netflix or services that stream movies.
We did a mix of human curation and random selection, noting which random selections were successful and which were not. It was effective enough. The thing about an experience like this is that it doesn't need to be perfect. Like channel surfing, if it doesn't catch you then just switch the channel.
Part of the issue with endless carousels of thumbnails now is that the thumbnails are almost invariable clickbait now. What will I actually get? I have no idea. Even YouTube channels I genuinely enjoy use thumbnails which are entirely different from the actual content. I suppose sensationalism has taken over.
You can't blame creators for playing the game. All they have is that thumbnail to market their content.
No, I don't blame them at all. I make the odd YouTube video and the choice not to use these thumbnails is essentially a choice to stay irrelevant. Not to say sensational thumb nails would help; I make boring videos. But even if they were meant to be more interesting, that choice would clearly be self-sabotaging.
I think the user intent matters. When I go to Netflix to choose what I want to watch the last thing I want is to be dropped into the middle of random content. I hate auto playing videos when I'm trying to decide if I even want to watch this.
On the other hand when I go to tiktok I get thrown into a random content at every finger flick and I'm delighted because that's exactly why I went there.
If Netflix had well personalized mini tiktok mode serving interesting scenes from the movies you can watch there it could do wonderfully.
Interesting movie scenes is entire genre of tiktok videos. Another movie related genre is narrated summaries of weird movies. This requires bit of work to prepare but still could do well.
This Netflix feature drives me crazy. Now I always mute my TV when browsing Netflix because as you highlight items they play and it is super annoying.
TikToks has a bunch of channels playing juicy clips from random movies and shows. always have to pop into hashtag or comments to find out what. Maybe they got axe, I don't see them in my feed anymore, but more than a few times I wished there was one click to keep watching optinos. There's always short form video that gets people side tracked, why not side track into an episode of a show.
Neat! I have wondered how much of a foothold "retrograde" tech will take in the next 10-20 years.
Decision fatigue, nostalgia, attenuation — call it what you will. At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
A very modern malaise. Excuse the armchair philosophizing.
There's certainly a market for it among the older crowd, but for those who've spent their formative years consuming content in the Netflix / Youtube era ... you can't miss what you've never had. I do echo the decision fatigue complaint - there is simply too much content out there to meaningfully engage with. The downsides of living in such a connected world ...
This is actually very untrue. It sound right but it's not. A lot of the younger crowd takes to analogue devices as bees to honey when they've had a chance to use it. Vinyl is a growth market. Tapes are being collected. Even film roll companies are experiencing year over year growth. Since their demise 10 years earlier. I think it's because all these things are not "nothing" you can destroy them, lose them, sell them, buy them, own them, give them away, hold them, they are unique and hard to copy.
I'm fairly young. One of the first things I want to do now that I start to get grown-up money is buying a decent record player and some vinyls.
> At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.
I don't think there's enough useful and organized information to evaluate. There's no reason for everyone to be stuck in a vast ocean of content labeled with a handful of vague categories, except that that's just the way that someone decided to make it.
If I want to figure out if I want to try a game, I can go to steam and watch a trailer, look at the tags, and still have no idea if the game is worth playing. How do I make a decision?
If I just watch 3 minutes of a lets play, or a live stream, I can get an idea of what the game is like. This youtube channels thing is giving us exactly that experience.
Opening a youtube video directly, on the other hand, is an entire ordeal. It's slow to load, takes up a bunch of ram, puts the video in your history and messes up the minigame of trying to micromanage the algorithm so you don't end up with bad recommendations. It's hard to just simply watch a few seconds of a bunch of videos to get a vibe.
There's so much low hanging fruit in terms of content organization/discovery, it drives me insane that the experience is generally so bad, and getting worse.
Clay Shirky gave a talk on this years ago (also I think it's a blog post) called "It's not information overload, it's filter failure". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
This is actually making me think about how I watch programs when I dont really need to focus in on anything. I wonder if there is a plug-in where you can spin the wheel between types of media to watch and it selects one for you.
Also works on localhost, run these commands:
`wget -r -np -k https://ytch.xyz` - downloads the website recursively
`wget https://ytch.xyz/list.json` - download the list of what every channel plays and will play (I'm not sure if this ever really changes. The real website adds ?t=<time since epoch in ms>)
Then for instance run `python3 -m http.server` and visit localhost:8000
:)
When a channel reaches the last video, list.json will be fetched to get an updated list of videos.
I see that you're the creator, I absolutely love what you made :)
I'm curious, do you generate that list on-the-fly, based on the current time/day? Or is it more static?
How are you making this list? The thing I surprisingly miss about tv is that what to watch was someone else's problem. YouTube overwhelms me with choices, TV was simple, I liked maybe 4-5 channels and (I later realized) I was implicitly trusting them to have something good on.
If I was allowed to dream, I imagine a world where that specialization is brought back. People curating a feed, which was on average good.
The author was replying to everyone, even me, but didn’t respond to my question about how the list is made.
This makes me assume that it’s hand-made. If so, it’ll probably get 1 or 2 updates (if even that many) and then remain static as the creator loses interest. Wouldn’t be the first time.
EDIT: list has changed. Trying to track it, we'll see what happens. I really hope the author has some way to search Youtube for trending videos based on some query/tag, and re-generates a list once a day or something like that.
Again, if I am allowed to dream, we can have a community around the exchange of these list files.
That would be an amazing addition!
Well, this website is completely cloneable, the JS is non-minified, so adding in community lists is certainly possible. Maybe just a tool to create those lists collaboratively. Good idea!
The possibilities are endless. You can build a site that lets any user create their own personalized tv with content from any streaming provider that has an api. This can be done in a few hours literally. And you don't even have to host them since it's all client side javascript. Honestly if I weren't so busy with my own project I would consider contacting OP to see what we could do with this.
JSON looks like tinydb
Or a PHP application returning an array as a JSON object
Even better, host it on github pages - then you mirror the code too https://stevemk14ebr.github.io/YTCH/ . Author, how do generate the list
Am I the only child of the 80s that hates this? A bunch of stuff I'm not interested in, and then I switched off. The moment TiVo was available we had it in our house and it was great. I still like the occasional shared experience of big sporting events or Eurovision or something on broadcast TV, but outside that it's just the equivalent of doomscrolling. If you look at your plethora of streaming options today and can't find anything to watch, just do something else. The wonder of the modern age is the sheer volume of stuff you can ignore entirely and never care about.
You're not. Though on a recent vacation, one of my kids only had access to cable and absolutely loved the randomness of what was available.
I'm a child of the 80s too and I haven't watched TV in a decade, save for the occasional TV in hotel room. I do miss the luxury of occasionally having what you watch already decided for you and the serendipity of discovering something engaging by accident. Lately it has started to feel like all the choices we have in modern life and the decision paralysis that entails is causing more not less stress. I'd hazard the biggest problem with the old format was not so much the lack of control as the lack of quality content and paradoxically having too much choice with the explosion of cable tv channels. I think there's space for a refined version of something like this to coexist with all the modern options - something like a personalized curator that picks quality content tailored to your tastes and just plays it without you having to decide exactly what to watch beyond flipping (a limited number of) channels.
I really like how there are only 12 channels, and you don't get to choose what's on. The only way to make it even more like tv from a few decades ago would be if half of the channels were static.
Given how full of crap content and intrusive ads YouTube is these days, I actually kinda miss tv from back then. About the only benefits at this point are time shifting and pause/rewind.
I mean you realize there were many more ads per hour on TV though right? What makes the youtube ones more intrusive?
With real TV and a DVR you haven't had to see a single commercial in the last 25 years if you didn't want to.
We don't talk enough about how streaming has forced us into a much worse experience with ads that are unskippable, privacy-invading, and now I hear they're being dynamically inserted into programming mid-scene.
We talked about it plenty back when the legacy media companies were refusing to move online. "The ad spend isn't nearly a high online." they would say, with "Yeah, but people actually watch the ads online. Give it a few minutes." in response.
At some points topics become stale.
I've long since concluded that YouTube's ads are merely a way of persuading me to upgrade to Premium. Given that they actually seem to be pretty good at recommending content to me I am mystified by why the ad selection is so awful.
1. If the ad selection is too good, people will fall into the uncanny valley. They have to make it terrible enough to maintain user confidence.
2, They may not have anything better to select from. Quickly start/stop the ads a few times and it will usually (but not always) give up on showing any ad at all, which suggests to me that the available ad pool at that point in time is being exhausted.
I got a f'n Trump asking for money ad on YT last night. The algorithm should know better than to serve me something like that.
If the ads are indeed just a way to push for subscriptions and you are upset or annoyed by a particular add, the algorithm is perfectly doing its job.
But doesn't it make sense to pay for targeted political ads towards people opposed to you? The algorithm allows advertisers to do targeted advertising, and you were targeted, the subtle implication that targeted advertising would only show you "what you want to see" was intentional and misleading to get people on board with their attention being sold to the highest bidder.
Because you are already a donor?
The ad placements aren't tailored to you. They're tailored to the advertiser's wishes.
It's still trivial to block these though with a combination of uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock. Despite Google's ongoing efforts to make this impossible.
have you forgotten how bad commercials were back then, and still are?
I haven't watched TV in years and years and years, because of the ads. I have a YouTube premium subscription and I am not ever going to watch broadcast or cable tv again. ever.
> have you forgotten how bad commercials were back then
Most weren't 'bad', just noise.
Sure there were some cringy ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts0XG6qDIco
But some were GREAT!
-- Remember 'CH-ch-ch Chia Pet!' ?? ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzY7qQFij_M
-- How's about local commercials, like in Philadelphia: "Krass Brothers - Store of the Stars!!" ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5R4rNxSWFw
By “bad” I mean “commercials exist and are shown on TV”.
I don’t ever want to see a commercial. I have never been influenced by one. I never will be unless they change dramatically. There is no sales pitch that does not immediately make me dislike the salesperson.
“You don’t deserve your money as much as I do.” That’s all a commercial is. “We want your money so here is some quick audio and maybe video designed to convince you to give your money to us, in exchange for something less valuable than the amount you paid.”
Or if they could simulate an antenna rotor and you had to turn it towards the station.
if we're talking about stuff to make it more authentic, how about looking up my local weather if there's a strong storm the quality drops + more static, and a small (rng) chance of it completely breaking if the antenna upstairs got completely broken by the strong wind.
For real accuracy of tv of a few decades ago they could add a 13th channel that takes content from Pornhub, but then adds a bunch of filters so you can barely see anything.
Even better: make not-porn videos with vegetables, but when it's obfuscated it would look like porn. Repetitive motions will help.
Is this an American thing? This sounds hilarious
A Girls Gone Wild channel on channel 13 that only starts past 10pm.
Integrate a Kinect / Realsense camera that estimates your body pose, so you have to stand in front of the computer and hold your arms in a specific way to direct a weak signal into the rabbit-ears...
This blew my mind, it's such a different experience. Currently watching the music channel (8, The Lumineers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)).
Since the author is reading here, one feature request: Please put a volume slider on it and also make a mouse wheel scroll on any part of the page change the volume.
I think it's the lack of timeshift which triggers me so much, since it's a somewhat standard feature on TVs. No way to pause makes me a bit anxious. I have a bad habit of nesting YT videos, where I pause one, watch another, pause that one, watch another, when it finishes I go back to the previously paused one and so on until I end up watching the first video to the end.
Theoretically you could add a per-client timeshift feature.
If you really like a video and want to watch it later, it displayed the video ID.
I really like the no pausing / everyone being in sync aspect, it's maybe the best feature
Why not add a link to the video instead of just the id?
Because you want it to be a hurdle. The hurdle nudges you to not go to the YouTube experience and stay in the YouTube tv experience. So to the creator: the way you did it now is perfect!
I've always wanted a recreation of 80s Saturday morning cartoons, you can choose one channel to watch and if you switch away to another channel, it's gone, just like this. You have three primary channels and two secondary or "local" channels (and maybe a PBS) to choose from. It's a 5½ hour block, to simulate starting at like 6am and going until 11:30am. You get a bunch of half-hour kid and pre-teen shows for a few hours, and then you get some more older teen-oriented shows (like Saved By the Bell), and a 1½ hour block of the cartoon variety-hour shows like The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. CBS would always have some kind of wild-animal showcase. Throw in some toy commercials, School House Rock, the Time for Timer PSA ("A hanker for a hunk of cheese!"), and those bumpers that showed you how to make the "come back can" and how to whistle with an acorn top.
It's the delivery and the format that I'm nostalgic for, it doesn't need to be the vintage material. It would be cool to have some modern School House Rock and PSA and mini-craft projects.
Grab a big bowl, a box of cereal, and a carton of milk and just veg out in your pajamas on the couch on a weekend morning.
I did this in Plex using DizqueTV. It was a blast to set up, schedule, and insert a selection of toy ads from the era to make it feel real.
Of course, I only watched it once or twice before I realised I am not capable of sitting through 6 hours of cartoons any more. The sugary cereal made me feel sick, too.
Strongly recommend.
Toonami Aftermath is very similar to this, but for late 90s/early 2000s.
https://www.toonamiaftermath.com/
Did something similar years ago for tech-related topics: https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/l3kel1/tech_tv/
Didn't get much love from the internet but it was featured on a popular site, along with other similar TVs: https://www.makeuseof.com/fun-streaming-sites-for-a-tv-like-...
Regarding the iframe, the YT controls. Someone has noted that it takes the TV experience away. I agree, but hiding the YT embedded UI is against TOS. Plus the UI already has sound control, subtitles, link to the video - features that others suggested here.
I have an extra suggestion: Maybe some keyboard key mapping, like up/down for switching the channel. I'm imagining having this perma-running in a small PC connected to a TV and the small wireless remotes have mappings for the arrow keys and up/down for channel would be perfect for that. (maybe other mappings as well)
Seconding the keyboard mapping. Up/Down or Left/Right would be helpful.
I love this OP. Well done!
Are we going full circle from TV to streaming back to TV? Probably not, but I do really enjoy the discovery aspect as well as reducing the overwhelming options of streaming down to a few channels.
This has a super smooth feel and throws you directly in, really well done.
Its the discovery aspect I miss, even cable had channels you could look at shows of a type - scyfi or Arena etc. Even free to air had reliable shows pre picked for you that you could rely on being decent. Now there's a fire hose of shows on Netflix, some good, some bad finding something to watch is now a task.
I'm old enough to miss channel changing and really like this.
But even moar than that, boy do I love me some Youtube iframe API - https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference - it's probably the last but certainly coolest piece of FAANG Web 2.0-ness left
Really love this and couldn't help but sketch out a quick YTCH-Guide https://git.jonathanbobrow.com/YTCH-Guide/
Github repo is here: https://github.com/jbobrow/YTCH-Guide
I thought this was stupid.
Then I tried it. It's awesome. I can't tell you why, but there's something about it that, I guess, has been programmed into my brain over decades.
Great work.
Just like https://80s.myretrotvs.com/
TIL alternative front-ends are a thing.[1]
I wonder what an alternative commercial culture might look like, to enable a monetized FRAND ecosystem of UI diversification and evolution.
[1] https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends
As someone who grew up with a handful of channels and no recording or TV guide besides the one that came in the paper, this experience is pretty accurate* , so kudos on the execution, but in contrast with some other comments, it is not nostalgic in any positive way. I will gladly take clickbait thumbnails and titles over wasting time flipping through garbage.
* It's missing the part where you get your little sister to hold the antenna in a certain position so you can get a clear picture.
Funny, how we are slowly attracted towards the thing that we were planning to revolutionize away from.
1. Cable is expensive, pretty much majority of streamming services bumped up their $$$, if you add 3-4 of them, the cost will be the same as cable.
2. When i used this, cant lie. I missed the nostalgia.
This is perfect. Can it be customized (with custom channels and schedules)?
I was looking for exactly this to control my (and my kid's) TV habbits. My TV is only for YouTube. Everything we like watching is on Youtube.
But with remote in hand, it NEVER STOPS. We (and my kid) keep jumping from one video to another. When I watched TV as a kid, I only had to be in-front of TV on a schedule. I would be doing something else in other times.
THIS is the YouTube TV that I need.
Love how you captured the feel of channel surfing. Seems like most videos/channels I surfed through were at the midpoint or near completed in their play through (usual if you just hop on the tube at the middle of the hour).
Goodness. I never realized how nostalgic it would feel to flip channels. Your project took me all the way back to being a kid in the 90s and clicking through channels on the TV at my grandparents' house after school.
I love it when I unexpectedly encounter something that turns on the nostalgia in such a deep way. Awesome project.
Do I love it because of the nostalgia, or is there something novel here worth exploring further?
One thing about analog interfaces is that they are really in a way empowering to the User. Don't like what you're seeing? Just one button press or the turn of a tuner dial and you're outta there and into a new thing. And there is no algorithm telling you what to tune into or which channels you see. Heck, if you want you could tune your radio in-between the station and listen to the static of the atmosphere for an hour.
As a programmer with UI experience (for both physical and graphical UIs) I am aware that nothing stops us from deploying similar paradigms in the digital domain and this is yet another example to make the point, that it is possible.
Sadly few companies nowadays have any incentive to make their interfaces so neutral, egalitarian and simple. It seems to take a special kind of radicalism to commit to limited controls and not slap open ended navigational structures, menus and so on onto a touchscreen. Car interfaces come to my mind.
I worked at Google ~ 2010 and I distinctly remember playing with a TV like experience like this that Youtube was working on (it was part of the Google TV efforts at the time). I don't remember if it made it to the public but it's probably in the large graveyard of cool products Google killed.
Wow this is really cool! Such a simple idea but very well executed and definitely hits the nostalgia factor too. As others have mentioned, I do miss the "stress-free-ness" of not having to pick a specific content to watch and how everyone is getting the same stream at the same time.
I've built a similar thing 3 years ago -> https://tv.istasyon.app Your comments here are golden and congrats to @hadisafa for his clean and simple execution.
My project was never used (except me and just my family) nor resurfaced on forums etc. but our choice of the same favicon touched me :)
My concern for such a project was that I found using the content that others created without attributing the og creator a bit sketchy.
P.S: It seems I leaked my app 10 months ago under another thread -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905024
This is the kind of brilliant idea that seems so completely obvious in hindsight that it's hard to believe no-one has done it before
Encountering this reminds me of the earlier days of the internet when finding novel things like this was a common occurrence. Reminds me of something you'd find using StumbleUpon.
Cable tv and even Amazon has “channels” for some YouTube stars.
I attempted a similar one 3 years ago actually (https://tv.istasyon.app). It was a weekend project and I left it as is since then.
Must be my crappy internet connection that lets me watch the white noise for an unbearable amount of time. It's a very annoying white noise. Also, I wonder if some channels send a sign-off sequence once they run out of content.
Oh I love that idea, a signoff message followed by an image of a test pattern for several hours, until they sign back on the next morning.
So neat! I've been thinking of something similar to this where content creators would join their content to form channels in the original sense of the word and users would browse much like how they would on a normal TV
This is very nice! Improvement requests:
* Add channel information so that folks can bookmark good stuff on YT.
* Add keyboard shortcuts for ease of channel surfing.
And then folks can buy one of those retro TV bezel for even deeper immersion.
My senior mother needs this. She doesn't use a computer, but does have a TV a firestick. I've tried showing her how to use the search of youtube but she is too use to how tv use to work and wants to channels to find something.
If this could be made into a firestick app or something and come with a recommendation system, allow some customization using topics instead of channel names and have them be editable and customized to different youtube interests - I would buy it
Really cool with great execution.
Out of curiosity, I'd love to know more:
- how the backend look like?
- Are the channels are based on a static pool of videos by category?
- Is there a "schedule" for a channel or picked at random?
- There is no backend, just html, css, and js
- yes channels are based on categories(science, travel, documentaries, etc.)
- yes there is a schedule, each video is scheduled to play at a certain time, so everyone is watching the same exact thing.
I love that this is a small amount of plain html and js, as I think the instinct for a lot of folks these days in creating this would have been to invest a lot of time in using the frameworks du jour.
Well done. Do you've plans for further development to grow this?
Definitely yes! Will add more features very soon.
Two requests!
1. unique urls per channel so I can send it to a friend and say "check this out" 2. up + down keys for changing channels
Also really enjoyed it and echo these execution questions.
This reminds me of Neverthink tv, which basically did the same thing except (recycling youtube videos into "tv channels") with heavy manual curation of content.
https://www.youtube.com/tv used to be this, but they closed it down.
Source https://github.com/stevemk14ebr/YTCH
Are you going to keep updating the content so it's current and has rewatchability? I would really like to keep using this.
So it appears that OP is only using items off YouTube front page as options on channels? I think this would be a lot more interesting if it chose more randomized content, especially having an option for content with low views...
Also, an option to do full-screen would greatly enhance the experience.
I think the biggest issue that exists with current YouTube is that so much is crammed into the UI and viewing experience (Ads, the videos on the sidebar, clunky controls to skip videos, etc...) that ruins the continuity of video content, especially when mixed with so many videos in different formats... It's also the same problem that TikTok is fighting with, it makes for a pretty disruptive viewing experience in comparison to cable TV or just choosing to watch TV shows or movies instead.
Wish it had video settings like captions, video quality etc
I'll add more control options soon :)
Closed captions would be really awesome so I can watch without sound.
don’t add too many features, one of the usp of this is simplicity and suspense.
Haha this is really well engineered, it feels honestly like TV and not a cheap iframe embed
Thanks, I love it. When I open YouTube homepage, I often have decision paralysis, but jumping right in the middle of a video glues my ADHD brain in.
Also, this really highlights how better is modern YouTube than TV that I used to watch as a kid.
This is awesome, it really gives you the feeling of flipping through channels and stopping up and just watch something random that you might not have otherwise.
Much of YouTubes potential is pretty much wasted, because of the monetization policy. It permeates the platform, even if you're a "Premium" subscriber. Rather than optimize for "engagement", it would be nice, even if it was a Premium feature, to be able to say: "I want to watch content that will help improve my health, teach me to become a better developer or "On Friday evening, I want long format retro computing content".
This is a great idea, I'd love to be able to use it on my TV. It would be nice if it also supported changing the playback speed to 1.5x, 2x etc - the youtube player has this so I'm assuming it's possible.
It's so refreshing to know that you don't have to watch everything. Go through the content, once you find something that you enjoy, watch it. Not worrying about what else you have to "watch later".
I’d love something like this where I can configure channels to have podcasts, music, movies and it all streams to my tv.
Is there something like this? I’ve heard of other users mentioning side projects like this.
There's a project called DizqueTV[0] that lets you set up "channels" of media to be streamed to a Plex server, which then lets you send that onto a TV.
It's not quite the same as straight TV channels. But it's pretty close!
[0]: https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv
I know of https://ersatztv.org which I used a while ago. With a Kodi frontend you can play on TV. Not sure it does podcasts and music though but I used it successfully for movies and TV shows.
For music I setup a micro pc at my place connected to a radio transmitter. I have a music library on it and set it to shuffle. I can have normal radios around my house, tune to my station, and it’s always something I like with no commercials. I don’t have multiple stations to flip to, but that’s ok. I like the simplify of turning on a radio without having to pick what’s playing. I can also turn on multiple radios and it works just like those fancy setups for multi room music streaming at a fraction of the cost/complexity. Something like Sonos or AirPlay requires a lot to do what a radio could do decades ago.
The transmitter seems pretty weak, to maintain a legal status with the FCC, so some days it works better than others. I probably need to experiment with placement or other frequencies. I’m in a pretty congested area from that perspective. I found a website that suggests the best one based on the city a user us in and just went with that.
I wish there were reserved frequencies for personal use that would make home transmitters better to use. I have 0 hope for that now, but during the era of FM transmitters being popular in cars, it would have been nice if it had gotten some attention.
You're showing your age there, hadisafa, with that static simulation :)
Awesome work.
Great stuff, I really like it! As others mentioned, channel names, a channel list or a guide would help. Also, if you're looking for new channel ideas: (british) game shows or talk shows!
I worked at Pluto TV pre-launch, and YouTube "live" crammed into channels was basically our app, with a scheduler system that allowed us to also render a channel guide.
Please tell me you worked with Thomas?! This is essentially what Pluto tv is / was.
Yep! Still keep in touch.
Several years ago I spent a great deal of time thinking about how to create something like this, glad someone did it!
My vision went beyond this into allowing users to create their own channels (still only identifiable by a channel number) which would basically just be a playlist. I think a better idea now would be to have them add a list of channels and have it randomly play videos from only those channels and have that interrupted by anytime that channel is live streaming.
Don't add a thing - the purity is what makes this perfect.
Very cool concept, congratulations!
I do have two bugs to report.
1) I only see static until I fiddle with the mute button, which makes the image work besides working as expected. As soon as I change channel, all static again until I hit mute. I'm on Chrome over Windows using a corporate network.
2) The info button shows a reasonable email address, and, under "Support", the string "bc1q4s2f6df2cqa8stenwp8y5tlmd5pywy8dwqqxvh". I have no idea what to do with that string.
Thank you for the feedback.
1) The static shows when the video is buffering, maybe it's a slow network problem?
2) The string is a bitcoin address :)
In Brave, even disabling ad blocker, all I get is static on all 12. Did we kill it?
*edit - oops, I have an extension to stop autoplaying html5 videos. Disabling that did the trick.
It does take much longer than I expected to load (~15 seconds), but it does work for me
Similar experience using Firefox. I don't have extensions or userscripts specifically blocking html5, but I'll check my user.js settings.
Til then, still getting the static.
I feel like the secret sauce to this is the fact that it drops you into the middle of a video. If it was just a queue of videos that play from start to end it wouldn't be as interesting. I cant believe Netflix hasnt added something like this for TV shows. Just drop you into something random and have a few basic categories to choose from. Its so much better for discovery than having to judge 100s of shows based on their thumbnail.
This scratched the right itch for me. Deciding what to watch is so difficult and this limits options in just the right way. It really does feel like TV. Good job!
Second channel in and someone is saying "plandemic" maybe channels on youtube just highlights how close you are to some of the weirder views on there.
Very neat. I like the channel idea. There’s also https://random-video.com which shows one of 4.5 Billion YouTube videos randomly (or with a filter for view count, language, year).
Pretty fun to discover what’s out there, without being influenced by YouTubes algorithm. It’s based on the YT Archive project and some other sources, since YT sadly has no randomize function.
Suddenly I see that tiktok and YouTube shorts and such are just new incarnation of chanel flipping mechanics. And I'm not sure if it's better all around.
Algorithm driven personalized YouTube videos playing from random moment with easy follow up with rewinding to see the whole thing or more from this creator or more like that would be awesome.
You can also be smart about where from start playing by using the hot moments information from YouTube.
I made the same thing a few years ago. Youtube embeds, react, socket.io and postgresql on a node.js server. I got the idea from poolside.fm's video player.
https://wem5637.medium.com/i-made-a-probably-illegal-youtube...
This is very cool! I've actually been working on something similar for some time as a feature on my website https://www.bingeclock.com. Can I ask if you've done something to minimize the number of banner ads Youtube pushes onto the screen? That has been a challenge for me and yours looks very clean! Awesome job!
Think the website is getting the HN hug of death; just static for me on every channel, but reminded me of a story:
Recently my sister was on a vacation with her family, and my two nephews were upstairs watching TV. They came down "Mom - The TV is broken!", she goes upstairs - working fine. 10 mins later it repeats, and repeats again.
Finally, she catches when the TV "breaks" ... it's a commercial, haha.
I can't believe how awesome this is. I've spent hours watching.
I'm not sure what's going on. Why is this so great?
The lack of toxic labeling, which is everywhere now?
Thank you.
Indeed. Not being poisoned with clickbait thumbnails and short reels. What a relief.
This is mesmerizing. I zapped twice, landed on an interesting channel and... Moved the window to another monitor and full-screened it. Well done.
You should make the channels change the video they're playing on a schedule, and link to a tv guide listing that shows the schedule.
I understands what you're trying to replicate, but I believe this would distract from the charm since users could then just visit YouTube [directly] and search for things scheduled.
The randomness and uninterrupted playback is why this is so cool =D
The channels are on a schedule, everyone is watching the same exact video at the same timestamp!
I download videos and schedule them as channels with https://ersatztv.org/ to watch through Plex locally to get the same effect. I usually want some noise on the background and in that mode I can't be stopping frequently to choose the next video or mess with playlists.
I remember cobbling something like this together myself using a Kodi plugin called PseudoTV a number of years ago
Definitely a lot more usable from a browser for sure. I'd echo other comments that a TV guide style interface would be a fantastic addition that would take this from a "that's cool" to something I'd potentially regularly use.
This is amazing. It reminds me a little of betamaxmas[0]. I wish I could find a Christmas Channel! :)
It also occurs to me that there are a whole bunch of people here for whom this doesn't offer any nostalgia or memories, but is purely just a weird old affectation.
[0] https://betamaxmas.com/
This is great! I wonder what the best way to get this up on a TV, preferably with control of the channels through the remote.
A physical selector dial for your faves would be nice.
I remember we had a chunky dial that required a lot of force (for me as a little kid) to turn from channel to channel. It had a bunch of channels (a dozen?) but I think there were only two channels broadcasting. (My Dad bought a B&W TV for us to watch the moon landings)
I see channels 1-12 = static. The status of each says Unstarted.
Same experience with a different browser. Also same after shifting location.
The shared reality, the shared experience of hearing and seeing things at the same time as others are listening, creating content... Radio and TV and theater give this to us, where hyper individual on demand feeds break it.
I hope society decides to retain some level of "over the air" information sharing that is synced.
This is a neat idea.
I love this! Criterion Channel has a similar sort of function - a single, continuous channel (called 24/7) that plays curated movies from their collection. Did you curate the list of channels / videos?
Also, how is the noise generated? I know it's a tiny thing but it looks a bit repetitive / pseudorandom.
This is just delightful. What would make it perfect is the white noise that you get while switching channels.
In a similar vein: https://radio.garden
I love this. I've often thought about this type of interface for youtube and also beyond. Also, the same thing with audio, bringing a terrestrial radio type of experience to internet based audio content. Very cool to see someone taking actual steps and not just day dreaming. :)
I watched right up until I heard a goddamn ad for manscape or dollar shave club or whatever the fuck
Please make this an Amazon Fire TV Stick App! Would love to simply switch on and keep doing my work.
This is super fun, but I hope the content creators are being compensated. Content creators work hard to produce this content under the assumption they will be paid for it (in one of many different potential channels but the HOW is less relevant).
This is built using the official youtube api.
https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference
There is a bug when using qutebrowser (using arch linux) - when turning on the sound, the TV turns off (e.g. goes to black-and-white-noise-mode). When turning off the sound, the TV turns on again.
On google chrome, all is well. Just for FYI :) very cool project!
Slightly similar bug in DuckDuckGo on Android, unmuting causes the video to buffer again but it then pauses itself and there's no way to unpause it.
This is such a fun idea, great execution too.
In a way I feel TikTok taps into this type of TV-like discovery, where you are not overloaded with options but instead just swipe through channels until you find something you want to stop and watch.
The main benefit of TV was (and sometimes is, e.g. bbc if we ignore news) editioralized picking of programs. There was someone deciding if a video is worth watching (and in many cases acting in good faith).
Very useful in modern Youtube world.
Great idea, beautifully executed!
was annoying that i couldn't find the source of the the video (i know you provide the id, but still), had to remove a couple of elements to be able to rightclick the video and copy the url at timestamp
Agreed, it is so clean and simple what @hadisafa did! In my version (https://tv.istasyon.app/) I made it more obvious instead of hiding title etc., I thought it would be more honest to the actual creator with a ref back.
Hey, this is great! Could you make it so clicking on the video ID in the bottom right corner opens the full video in a new tab? It would be nice to be able to like / save the whole video for later. Kinda like DVR.
It's a pretty good idea, but how are the videos picked? I flipped through all the channels and 11/12 was Americans talking (and the last one was sports). Would it be easy to be able to set the language?
Are those livestreams or videos? They seem like videos but if they would be livestreams it would be cool if you could speak to a livestream and then it would speech to text type it in the streamer's chatbox.
These are just youtube videos but they are synced so everyone is watching the same thing at the same time.
I like UIs like this when just one thing is in the focus....I think few years ago here on HN someone did something like this but for Twitch; where you could switch back and forth between live streamers which had only 1 viewer. This format is definitely good for fast and easy discovery.
This is what makes the experience for me. You can tell someone "check out channel 12" and you'll both be watching the same thing just like we used to do.
Yo Peter, just out Channel 9!
[It's the best exam, kind of looks like Anne]
—Office Space (1999), the movie which inspired me to drop out of graduate school and become an electrician
I see people asking the creator to add some data about the channels, but i think this is intended to mimic traditional TV, where they didn't have any information other than what the producers put on screen.
I've been dying to try this but on macOS Sonoma 14.5 both Chrome and Safari cannot establish a secure connection.
Chrome complains
> This site can’t provide a secure connectionytch.xyz sent an invalid response. ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR
Very cool. A lot to be said for jumping right in to the action. This is a perfect demonstration of that "law" that states you can skip the first 30% of a YouTube video and not miss much.
So, the content in this test is all TV production content as far as I can see. I reckon this would really hit it’s strides once it was changing through content actually produced just for You Tube.
How many years do you think it would take, and how powerful a computer would you need before you could switch Youtube channels as fast as channels on a regular analog TV from the 1960's?
This is what YouTube TV should have been. Google is blowing it. They have an unlimited collection of high-quality content, for free, just begging to be organized into channels.
Love this. Good quality video and low latency. The content? Well, can't please everybody. I was looking for cartoons, any cartoon. No dice. That would be great addition.
There's something cool about knowing that other people are all watching the same thing at the same time. Sports are really the only thing that give that feel now a days.
This is interesting. Maybe this could help bring back some long form tv, which in my opinion is better than watching TikTok which consumes our dwindling attention span
It seems like random videos are being played from many years ago and/or getting live feeds of some stations. Does everyone get the same selection of channel feeds?
Yes everyone is watching the same content at the same time just like an actual TV channel.
Just got addicted to Ch 12 which is a bunch of interviews and talk shows. Never knew this was what I was missing to go off in the background at an isolated work place.
Is there a way to embed this? I use Obsidian and want to capture this for historical sake and when I want to go back to it I can search for it on my hard drive.
Really cool idea btw.
This is so wonderful, thank you. Please don't change anything about it (except making the explanation of the channels available in the site's info panel)!
Could you precache some of the videos so you can click through faster?
This should probably be a toggle and then you can set how many channels each way depending on your bandwidth.
This is awesome! How are the videos being chosen? Without any monetization, I guess we shouldn't expect anything more than a loop of the same videos, right?
The videos are hand-picked and are scheduled so everyone is watching the same thing at the same time.
I guess what I'm getting at is, we shouldn't expect this hand-picking to continue indefinitely, since this isn't a paid service. I'm guessing the playlists will start to loop before too long?
This is still an experiment at the moment, we'll figure it out.
Cool. Even if it never updates, I think it's awesome. Thanks for building and releasing it.
My vote is to _not_ let the features creep in. Keep it simple. Make a more advanced one at a different address or something. The beauty here is the simplicity,.
Not having the algo recommendations but with your curation is also amazing. I’ll need to pin this to my tv app folder to remember to try it on the big screen.
This is super cool!
I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of super-charged tag-based browsing of various existing sites that are annoying to browse. YouTube is one of them.
Love it! This is a brilliant example of how removing choice actually make the product so much better. If this was an app on a Apple TV I would actually use it
This amazing and great! I absolutely hate having to choose something to watch from an immensive infinite list, specially when I'm just trying to relax.
I love this! This is how I want to watch stuff sometimes, very relaxing to take away all the functionality and (mental) noise that comes with it. Thanks.
One of the keys to the success of this thing is not letting it become infested with advertisements. The desire to monetise will be almost irresistible.
Very cool, I like the old school feel of watching whatever is on. That said I immediately noticed the lack of volume control, which IMO is essential.
To everyone saying this needs this feature or that feature: it really doesn't, it's perfect as it is. Please don't complicate it OP!
I would love to see this with my feed. Like personalized but always running. Seems like a good alternative to clickbait thumbnails and titles.
Wow this is really cool. I'd love to have specific channels for Ai, NBA highlights, etc, all of which are readily available on Youtube.
This is amazing! It brings back old school feelings. Just turn it on and let it run in the background. The limited choice is sooo freeing.
What a different experience than default UI. Are you making the source for this public, and/or is it based on an existing project?
There is no backend, just plain html, css and js. The source is public.
Amazing! Are you generating the list.json and just pushing new data when it's due to run out? Or is there some logic that loops it?
Man, this is strangely compelling ... it's a very different experience. The only complaint is I have no idea what I am watching.
There is a youtube video id on the remote :)
I personally love the minimalism.
remings me of https://90s.myretrotvs.com/
The quality of the steams are excellent. I would love to know how it works so well with no buffering and latency. I like it.
I love this, it would be perfect for my parents. The algorithm tends to send them down weird rabbit holes and echo chambers.
This hooked me right away! I wish it had pause though because I discovered a show I wanted to watch and had to work. :(
you can record it though. OBS Studio becomes your VCR.
you can copy the video id (below the controls) and watch it later on youtube
Is there a reason it's not a direct link? I just right-clicked "Search Google for..." but still...
I know it's no way possible to add any Hollywood Movies, but if it's possible it would just look like a real TV
So amazing and so well executed. Brings a tear to my eye. I'd love this app on my tv. I hate deciding what to watch.
Why do people build video players with no volume control, it has to be one of the worst UX choices in common practice.
If you could take 10-12 key words and build personalised channels based on those topic/keywords would be amazing.
Just gotta say, this is incredible. If this was an app on my "smart" TV I would use it more than the YT app.
I have nothing else to contribute to this conversation other than to say this is fucking amazing. Brilliant job, mate.
This is amazing. Let's hope youtube doesn't block it.
I already pay for YT Red and would love this to be an official feature.
This is awesome since it removes decision fatigue completely. It turns YT into a TikTok with quality content. Great.
The most amazing thing is the off button. Think about it. I've never seen a website that just turns off before
This webpage need to be converted to a PWA application. That's would be a great or better experience!!!
The worst thing about youtube is the discovery part. It's abysmal, an early 2000s derelict, a shitshow.
This is simply awesome, but apologies, I don't follow, what's the source for all the content?
The content is hand picked, no algorithms :)
Incredible. Thanks for your dedication; today's reaction should either inspire you, or result in a Cease and Desist (I hope it's just the former).
Absolutely love the sense of discovery this has. Kudos to the creator… I will be watching for updates!
This reminds me of a spinoff project from the creator of SpySpace (L4nd) called "Toobin.tv"
This is cool and really well done, I'm kinda blown away. Would love to hear from the creator on what inspired them and how they designed and made it retro yet also minimal and so smooth. It's been awhile since I saw something so well polished!
Imagine if it also included to an index channel like the old Cable TV Guide programming schedule screen, with the blue background and time slot cells. Some versions of this even had a PIP (Picture-in-Picture) sort of capability.
E.g. https://i.redd.it/ygxao2bj0jz81.jpg
+1 would love to read a writeup about how this was made. Very cool.
One of the keys to success for this thing is not letting it become infested with advertisements.
plz add subtitles, if they exist
Brilliant - and if the channels are actually broad in content and varied... Yeah!
This is brilliant. Great for my old TV where browsing youtube (or the internet) is a chore.
This is genius.
Keeping the number of channels limited (<50?) is important to the experience, I think.
I love this idea, I kind of created something similar with skipvids.com subscriptions
I wish the arrow keys and/or scroll wheel could be used to change channels too.
I’ve watched more YouTube today than I have cumulatively this month. A lovely thing.
This is neat! Feels just like old cable, the static transitions being a good touch.
Perhaps you like this nostalgic TV as well then: https://90s.myretrotvs.com. It also uses Youtube as a source and plays uninterrupted like an old-school channel.
This seems like it'd be great to have playing at an old folks home. I know my grandparents watch the Johnny Carson/Tonight Show channel for a taste of their old culture
Also discussed on HN:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906022
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25973955
Can confirm, I like it.
Need a larger "static" sprite so it's not obviously a sprite.
Maybe an atlas, or a selection of (larger) sprites to choose from, displayed in random order
This is great, really smooth
Thank you!
There used to be reddit.tv for this, but it would start everything from 0s
It's surprising I've never heard of anything like this before!
I love this. Please keep it running. I just bookmarked it in favorites.
Awesome! But please remove the static fuzz it's really unpleasant.
It's unpleasant because of the repeating patterns, IMHO. If it actually looked like NTSC or PAL snow it'd be quite nifty.
That's probably one of those things that's harder to generate dynamically than it sounds like it would be, though. Perlin noise might be the right approach.
oooo I love being dropping in to content
I miss that aspect of the tv experience, something live streamers do still except that it’s just them playing a game, rambling or doing porn. This is far more diverse
Feels way better without the likes, comments, ads and recommendations.
Timing for this being on FP could not be better given Github downage.
Somebody finally made the Interdimensional Cable from Rick and Morty.
cannot get past UNSTARTED or buffering... Am I doing something wrong?
video speed controller extension is automatically speeding up the video for me and I can't change it back on this website (due to the invisible divs covering everything I think)
If youtube had channels you'd need a TV license to watch it.
In the UK. I'm sure the US would create something similar but more obnoxious.
Add an “upload video” link and YouTube suddenly has competition.
Maybe you realize this (or not), but each channel is comprised of YouTube videos streaming from Youtube. This website is a very well done, clever front-end. But it doesn't host or stream any video.
Copy the ID of any of the channels and you can bring up the source video on YouTube by adding it to the YouTube URL after the ?.
this is great but I wish I could customize or disable the flashing between channel changes, it's really strobe effectish when changing quickly and hard on my eyes
This is amazing! I want this on my TV as the default firmware!
Thank you!
That's awesome. Can you package it into a Google TV app?
How do I disable the static effect between channel changes?
For now you can't, but i'll be adding more features soon.
I noticed you have a BTC address listed. I showed your app to my friends and one of them who doesn't have an HN account asked if you have a "Solana" address.
this is the best thing ive seen in a long time! instant pmf
Well done. Would this work on iOS natively through an app?
I've put it on for 2 hours now, this hits the spot.
Oh no.
(This is great. Just... it's too easy to get lost in this!)
This feels good, thank you for hacking it together!
Loved this. Would it be possible to add subtitles?
Excellent execution. Need some green volume bars.
This is awesome, wish it worked on my firestick.
Can u make it use only your subscribed channels?
This is so cool, thank you for building this!
This is awesome. How come we never see ads?
I've also noticed that when I did my version of this app more than 3 years ago (https://tv.istasyon.app). Somehow the ads are limited or gone if you play videos as embedded. At some point, I thought YouTube had fixed that but seemingly not. The easiest way to do it is to find the YouTube video URL and replace that part `/watch?v=` with `/embed/`, then voila!
This is what will replace tiktok: Television. Having to scroll down or swipe is just so tiresome, it leaves marks on the screen and ... who cares if i have to wait for a crap video to end , maybe there s something good after that. We are going to come full circle
I reckon TikTok will just scroll for you.
Next level: feeding tube
Is there an open source code repo for this?
By what I understood there's only front-end code. Ignoring the file server, of course.
Can't you just embed the youtube videos?
Yeah, the site uses an iframe to youtube
Perhaps the ideia of a back-end was the video selection, so everyone watches the same videos. But there could also be a video list in the source code, or maybe, but less likely, a deterministic usage of yt's algorithm
My wife bitched theres no beauty channel.
Don't worry kids, it's Google's remote work policy that is the problem, not their terrible product design and lack of innovation.
This is incredible, thanks for sharing
Incredibly well done! Great execution
this is phenomenal, i love it, it genuinely feels like flipping TV channels. really excellent work!
Thank you :)
I don't know why I love this.
This is great, but the static doesn't seem random? It just bugged me a tiny bit. Otherwise, I love this.
It looks like the static is tiled. So it's random (enough) within a tile, but you can perceive the tiling.
Damn, I realized the thing I like the most about this is I can be disappointed. There can legitimately be "nothing on", and then I can go and do something else to come back later. I think the most apparent way algorithms have messed with my head is teaching me there is always something on. So I keep wasting sometimes upto an hour just to find something. In the end I end up watching something I had already seen anyways.
This is unbelievably good
Please do a kids version!
I... I think I love it.
Take my money, so cool!
What about commercials?
This is really, really cool, but I'm a little disappointed that there's no credit for the channel / video you're watching when you click on the (i) icon—only a link to your own credit. I think if you're going to credit yourself, you have a moral obligation to credit the people who made the content you're highlighting as well.
The video id is on the bottom right.
this is so cool that I wish it were an app on my samsung tv
This is really slick!
Absolutely love this.
Judging from the enthusiasm from HN toward this in general, it seems like I'm in the minority in that I hate this experience. I was born in '87, for reference. Channel flipping always frustrated me, and I haven't had TV hooked up in my house in well over a decade - the TV is for youtube/streaming media only.
Where's CEEFAX?
On the radio?
on the Wireless. you may have to re-seat the valves and the string for the tuning dial broke years ago.
Effing brilliant!
Awesome. Now I can just flip between channels constantly. "Doom scrolling" the kids call it.
This is brilliant
Well done, bravo!
Thank you.
even the mainstreaminess is well-captured
Mesmerising
Now we need a TV Guide.
https://git.jonathanbobrow.com/YTCH-Guide/
Zapping!
can i selfhosted it?
radical, I love it.
this is amazing！
It can't be in alignment with YT terms though right? They will try to block it right?
this is tiktok
I now need USB rabbit ears so I can tune to the correct spot.
brilliant!
Why I f*cking love this? Congrats.
boomer.tube is not yet taken
my experience just got so much better lol, thanks!
It just needs upvote and downvote buttons and it would be perfect.
What would that do?
It seems flipping away is effectively a downvote, stating to watch is effectively an upvote. I’m not sure why we feel like everything needs to be actively voted on these days.
Thanks, I hate it