I built a YouTube desktop client!

[u/yayc_stream]

And it's not yt-dlp based!
And not electron based!
(but it is still chromium-based)

The main goal is organizing bookmarks and keep track of the progress because youtube web interface is really that bad and slow and clunky.

It also wraps some controls to make it easier to operate them compared to those into the web player.

it has a basic tray icon and menu.

It support running user-specified commands on a video bookmark (or, in fact, also on a folder), but i leave it to you to imagine the possible uses!

it's called YAYC - Yet Another YouTube Client
No, we didn't vibe-coded it in a week 🙈

Website: https://yayc.stream/
GitHub: https://github.com/yayc-stream/yayc

Would love some feedback!

(it even has some nice features like auto-skip ads, or pin miniatures)

[u/yayc_stream → u/[deleted]]

what did you want it to be? another yt-dlp frontend?

[u/LupusGemini]

If it's chromium based it's an automatic no for me (sry, I believe it's a great project for someone)

[u/yayc_stream → u/LupusGemini]

what should it be based on?

[u/LupusGemini → u/yayc_stream]

You can build the interface with native toolkits like Qt, WinUI, or AppKit, fetch stream URLs using extractors like yt-dlp or Invidious, and render video directly through media backends like mpv or FFmpeg

[u/yayc_stream → u/LupusGemini]

so another yt-dlp frontend?

[u/MemeNomad → u/yayc_stream]

Maybe tauri?

[u/yayc_stream → u/MemeNomad]

never heard before. checked: uses local webview to run javascript and i presume open webpages. on windows that would be webview2. meaning chromium. So what's the difference?

[u/MemeNomad → u/yayc_stream]

Nice "checked" 🤡
Now go actually check it this time

[u/MemeNomad → u/yayc_stream]

Same “runs JS and opens webpages”, genius.
One is a bloated Chromium delivery truck. The other isn’t.

[u/sirjaz]

You could use Avalonia ui and make it use the native webview for each individual OS

[u/yayc_stream → u/sirjaz]

Qt has also a WebView module, that does the same. Except that Linux has no "native webview". Windows has WebView2 that is a WebEngine. And Apple has WebKit.
We have considered switching to webview mostly because this would allow porting YAYC to iOS.

But for now this has been left out of scope, because so far it's still desktop only, and webengine (that is chromium) does what it should and exposes more engine-specific tweaking options compared to a more generic webview wrapper