Lumtub 0.2.32

Android

• yt-dlp now runs on Android, with the Python that comes inside the app. Live streams, members-only videos and downloads work, and a video Lumtub's own reader cannot open is tried again with yt-dlp.
• Downloads keep the best sound without ffmpeg: Lumtub joins the picture and sound itself. Opus sound gives a WebM file (an MKV beside H.264), AAC and Dolby (AC-3, E-AC-3) an MP4. Saved files carry their length and an index, so they seek at once.
• Lumtub updates itself: it downloads the new APK, checks its signature and hands it to Android's installer. Over a metered connection it only offers the update.
• On a TV, the screen switches to a refresh rate that fits the video while it plays (Settings › Playback › Match the frame rate), pages keep clear of the screen edges, and text is a little larger.
• Before looking for cast devices, Lumtub asks for Android 17's local network permission.

Block lists

• 96 more channels in the block lists are matched by their channel id, so they stay blocked when they change their name, and 17 channels that were listed twice are now one entry each.

Lumtub 0.2.31

Block lists

• Lumtub no longer asks about block lists when it starts, and nothing is blocked until you turn a list on in Settings. The question also came back at some starts and replaced the choices you had made; if you use block lists, please check them in Settings.
• Block lists now update on their own: once a day Lumtub fetches the newest lists, checks their signature (the same keys as Lumtub's own updates) and uses them from the next start. Settings › Home & search settings › Update block lists automatically shows the date of the lists in use and turns this off.
• The block list pages have a button that opens a form for suggesting a channel or reporting one listed by mistake. How the lists work and how to contribute is in lists/README.md.
• The block list files are tidied: each channel is one entry with all its names (979 entries became 568), and a channel can be added as just its @handle or channel id with a comment. Choices you made in the lists carry over.

Skins

• Glass goes down to 30% on every glass skin, Aurora glass included. Below the clearest level a skin keeps fully readable, the colour behind the video lists thins too, so more of the picture shows.
• Settings pages draw their title bar in the skin's style, glass included.
• "See the desktop through the window" is gone. In its place, Skin background turns a skin's pictures and landscape off and leaves a plain colour.
• 1-bit: the checkered desk shows only faintly behind the pages, so text there reads.

Theater mode

• In a window at least 900 pixels wide, the video now fills the height and comments, up next and chat sit in a side panel on the right with tabs. The panel folds away to give the video the whole width.

• In a wide window and in theater mode, the subtitle list is a tab of the panel beside the video, so it no longer covers the picture; the player's subtitle list button opens that tab. The panel opens on the tab you used last.

Fixes

• Original audio only no longer lets in videos whose title was only translated into the language you chose.
• Lists you tick or untick stay so when a later update of the lists changes what is suggested.
• A downloaded block list is kept as one signed file, so a damaged or half-written file is never taken for the newest lists and is simply downloaded again.

Explore and network

• Most watched reads further ahead before a page shows, and with a language filter the videos a page is still adding are ordered again as better ones turn up, so the list stays closer to most watched first.
• Downloads through Lumtub's own connection now go only as fast as the app reads them, so a large answer the app is slow to read no longer piles up in memory.

Releases

• Release builds no longer run the tests and screenshots their pull request already ran, so a new version is out sooner.

Lumtub 0.2.30

Skins

• New: skins that change Lumtub's whole look, in Settings › Appearance › Skins. 23 come built in: Y2K and Frutiger Aero styles with painted day and night scenes, retro desktops, early phone looks and more. The standard look stays the default.
• The ten colour schemes are skins now too, listed under Colour schemes on the same page; a scheme you had chosen carries over.
• A skin can draw its own title bar and menu bar. The empty part of either moves the window, and on Windows a double click maximizes and the maximize button shows snap layouts. "Hide the title bar" puts the window buttons into the menu bar; "Use the system title bar" turns both bars off.
• Glass skins can be made clearer, and some let the desktop show through the window (blurred on Windows and macOS). This is new, so please report how it looks on your system.
• Each skin is marked light and dark, light only or dark only, and the theme mode can be changed at the top of the page.
• Anyone can make a skin: a skin.jsonc file in the skins folder, with a commented template ("New skin"), a guide and a schema for editors. Changes show as soon as the file is saved.
• Every text and icon colour is checked for contrast, over pictures and glass too, and fixed if too faint. Skins follow warm light and Low resource mode.

Android (preview)

• New: Lumtub for Android phones, tablets and TVs (Android 7.0 or newer). Pick the android-arm64-v8a APK unless your device is an older 32-bit one.
• Background playback with media controls in the notification, picture in picture when you leave a playing video, and the back button going through pages.
• Phones get a bottom bar, with History, Playlists and Downloads together under Library. On Android TV the remote moves through everything and OK plays and pauses.
• Skins work on every device, each can look different on phone, tablet and TV, and you can add one from a file. On phones and tablets, glass skins can show your wallpaper through the app.
• Not yet on Android: live streams, members-only videos and downloads, because yt-dlp doesn't run there. Lumtub tells you about new versions, but you install them yourself.
• The APKs carry a post-quantum signature (ML-DSA-65 alongside EC P-384) as well as the usual one.

Casting

• AirPlay (preview): Lumtub now finds Apple TVs and TVs with AirPlay and casts to them. The first time, the TV shows a PIN to type into Lumtub; after that it remembers the TV. Play, pause, seeking and stop work from Lumtub. This is new, so please report how it works on your TV.
• Each TV can have its own stream format: MPEG-TS, HLS, MP4 or MKV, from the ⋮ menu next to it in the cast window. Auto picks HLS for Apple devices, MPEG-TS for other DLNA TVs and MP4 for Chromecast.
• Subtitles travel inside HLS and MKV streams, so TVs that ignore separate subtitle files show them too, one language or two.

Subtitles

• Subtitle lines on screen are evener: at most two lines, split to similar lengths, shrinking a little before wrapping, and never wider than 90% of the picture.

Live chat and support

• The Super Chat button opens the live chat's own window, where YouTube takes the payment, and a channel's menu has Join as a member.

Diagnostics

• Settings has a Diagnostics page: a network check, a short playback test of H.264, VP9 and AV1 with CPU, memory and dropped frames, and what is playing now (decoder, hardware or software, dropped frames).

Player

• The More menu can rotate the picture by 90°, 180° or 270°, for videos filmed sideways. Like mirror and zoom, it resets for the next video.

Linux

• The AppImage now carries libmpv 0.41 with FFmpeg 9 and libplacebo, up from libmpv 0.35 with Ubuntu 22.04's FFmpeg 4.4: newer hardware decoding (AV1 in particular) and fewer bundled libraries.

macOS

• The bundled ffmpeg is now FFmpeg 9.0.1, a ready-made LGPL build (dfloresc/ffmpeg-macos-builds) for each chip instead of one built for both: Intel Macs get the faster assembly code it had to leave out, and the DMGs are a little smaller.

Fixes

• Holding the mouse for 2× speed while the video changed left the next video fast; it now plays at the speed set before.

• Newer emoji in live chat and danmaku no longer show as empty boxes on systems whose emoji font lacks them (such as Windows 10): YouTube's own pictures of them are used.

• A channel with no Videos or Shorts tab shows an empty list instead of an error.

• Downloading yt-dlp, Deno or FFmpeg no longer fails at once when GitHub is briefly overloaded (HTTP 429 or 502–504): it asks again a few times.

• DLNA: TVs and boxes using Lebo (乐播) receivers can be cast to again.

• Linux: the video no longer stays black with Mesa graphics drivers.

• Linux: on a system with no PipeWire server running, playback no longer crashes trying it; sound goes through PulseAudio or ALSA.

• Turning danmaku on with nothing playing no longer fails.

• The sidebar labels follow a change of interface language right away.

• Explore: live stream lists are fetched again after two minutes instead of fifteen, and a search that finds only channels falls back to yt-dlp for videos.

Elsewhere

• A Simplified Chinese README, and new screenshots and a promo video.
• The controversial religious groups block list now also covers The Satanic Temple, the Church of Satan and the Order of Nine Angles (off unless ticked).

AirPlay and Apple TV are trademarks of Apple Inc. Lumtub is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple.

Block lists

The block lists of lists/, compiled and signed. Lumtub checks this release once a day; it is not an app release.

Lumtub 0.2.29

Explore

• Explore sub-categories, live ones with a language picked in particular, no longer load for a long time and end empty: the list keeps reading until videos actually show, videos whose language YouTube does not report are kept, and a failed source shows an error instead of an empty list.
• Zone mixes read their searches in parallel, so they fill faster. Live mixes search whole zones and keep streams you already watched.
• Live streams show how many people are watching now, apart from their view count.
• Upcoming streams and replays look through more pages before they stop, and an empty sub-category searches its zone more widely.
• When videos were found but your filters left all of them out, the page says so and offers to keep looking.
• Only Chinese, Japanese and Korean words of a zone search are translated; words like "lofi" or "blender" stay as they are, and 直播 becomes "live".

Linux

• The AppImage now runs on Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and newer (glibc 2.35 or later).
• It carries libmpv 0.35.1 built for it, which also plays on machines without a working graphics driver.
• An AppImage in a folder Lumtub cannot write, such as one a package manager installed, is left for that package manager to update.

Block lists

• The block lists are now plain text files in the repository, each with its sources, read by the Rust core.
• New lists of state media from Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Eritrea, Myanmar and Turkmenistan, and more channels in the Russian, Chinese and religious lists.
• A new install asks once which block lists to turn on; none is on unless you tick it. Settings saved by an earlier version stay as they were.
• Lumtub is also packaged for WinGet, Scoop and the AUR.

Lumtub 0.2.28

Keyboard and mouse

• Player keys can be changed in Settings › Playback settings › Customize shortcuts: seeking, volume, speed, fullscreen, next and previous video, subtitle lines and the rest. An action can have several keys, and a key given to one action leaves the action that had it, so [ and ] can seek and Shift + 9 / Shift + 0 (the ( ) keys) can change the volume. 0-9 and the media keys stay as they are. The shortcut help and the seek and volume settings show the keys in use.
• Right click on the video can leave fullscreen, or else go back to the page before (Settings › Playback settings › Right click on the video, off by default).

Fixes

• The "download finished" message and other messages with a button close on their own again instead of staying until they are closed.
• In theater mode the chat beside the video starts level with it; the button that hides the chat moved into the chat's title row.
• Chat lines made only of a channel's emoji are no longer "translated".

Lumtub 0.2.27

Playback

• Less memory while watching: what was already played is kept up to the 16–50 MB set aside for seeking back, as intended. libmpv lent that part the unused forward cache too, so a long video or live stream held up to about 190 MB of it.
• The "Low resource use first" playback strategy reads at most 30 seconds and 64 MB ahead and keeps 16 MB of what was played. The default strategy is unchanged.

Channels

• Channel pictures show on the watch page, on a channel's page and on its posts, where the first letter of the name stood. Each is looked up once and kept.

Bullet chat

• On videos without a chat, comments that name a moment ("1:23 the best part") fly across the picture at that moment. The first pages of comments are read; a comment listing chapters is left out. It can be turned off in the bullet chat settings.

Chat and comments

• An emoji button next to the live chat box, comments, replies and post comments. In a live chat the channel's own emoji come first; ones for members only are greyed out.
• Super Chats and Super Stickers show in their amount's colour, as on YouTube, and the larger ones stay in a strip over the live chat for as long as their amount buys; tap one to read it. The heart button over the chat turns both off.
• Chat authors show their picture; tapping a picture or name in the chat, comments or post comments opens that channel.
• Super Chat and Super Thanks: a button next to the live chat box and the comment box opens the video in your browser to pay there. Lumtub never handles payments.

Lumtub 0.2.26

Casting

• Subtitles go to the TV too: the one shown when casting starts, or both when a second subtitle is on, the second above the first as in the player. A Chromecast always shows them; a DLNA TV shows them when it reads subtitle files named in the cast (Samsung, LG and mpv-based players such as Macast usually do).

Playback

• A video no longer opens showing one corner enlarged for a few seconds: the last video's crop, kept for its picture size, is dropped before the next one opens.
• The first and second subtitle chosen last time come back on the next video again. When the video's details arrived before its file had loaded, the first subtitle was refused and the second one showed alone.
• When YouTube refuses the picture stream as a video opens, leaving sound and subtitles over black, the video is opened again with new addresses after 15 seconds.
• When a YouTube stream server answers 503 or not at all, Lumtub reads from the backup server YouTube names in the address, as YouTube's own player does, and keeps away from the failed one for 10 minutes. A live stream also asks again for about 10 seconds instead of switching between 1440p and 1080p, which came from the same server.
• Live streams above 1080p (1440p and 4K, any frame rate) start about 20 seconds behind the newest moment instead of three fragments, which was 3 to 15 seconds depending on the broadcaster's latency setting, so a pause in their upload no longer stops the picture at once.

Explore

• Searches translated for the explore language keep English phrases whole: "stand-up comedy live" in Italian is now "cabaret dal vivo" rather than a word-by-word "stare in piedi commedia vivere", so the live and other lists find videos again.

Lumtub 0.2.25

Explore

• The language filter offers all 72 interface languages, 35 more than before.
• "Confirmed audio only" is on by default and stricter: a video counts only when its original audio track or automatic captions are in the language. When YouTube leaves captions and audio tracks out of nearly all its answers, as it often does, titles decide again rather than nothing being shown. When YouTube stops answering the lookups, none are asked for ten minutes and titles judge meanwhile, so it is not kept refusing. The original track is found from YouTube's own audio tags, whatever the interface language, and a dub YouTube made the default no longer passes for it. A video whose language could not be looked up is left out.
• Popular, long videos and the most-watched live streams are ranked by views, and live streams by the people watching now, which their cards show. Videos keep YouTube's order while their language is being checked. With a language picked, videos show as they are found instead of after a page and a half of lookups.
• Global trending is gone; All with a region or language picked covers it.
• Live zones in a new order, with Lifestyle & fashion, Food & cooking, Art & creativity, Finance & business and Health & fitness added, Tech & development in place of Tech events, and 24/7 live holding the sleep radio and nature cams.

Warm light

• The warm light is set as a colour temperature, from 6000 K down to candlelight at 1900 K, as in night light tools such as f.lux.
• Following the sun, it warms with the sun's height through dusk and cools through dawn, from 3° above the horizon to 6° below, so it takes as long as twilight does where you are. On the hours set, it changes over the hour around them. Either way in twelve small steps.
• It warms white and near-white pages too, so the theme presets get warm along with the video, not only the palettes.

Network

• A proxy auto-config (PAC) script set in Windows, macOS or GNOME is followed: its proxy is used for Lumtub's connections.
• With a SOCKS proxy, host names are looked up by the proxy everywhere, and videos play through Lumtub's relay as with an HTTP proxy, live streams above 1080p included.
• Casting works in full quality through a SOCKS proxy.
• Casting at 720p and above works again: joining the picture and its sound failed on every try, leaving only a single file YouTube rarely serves.
• Deno installs and updates when GitHub's API limit is reached.

Subtitles

• In the mini player and picture in picture, subtitles are sized to the window: about a twentieth of its height, never under 13 px nor over full size. The mini player now shows them too.

Feedback

• Settings › About › Feedback opens forms for bug reports and feature requests.

Performance

• The window around the pages is rebuilt only when the appearance or language changes.
• Once a video has started from the quick start, the yt-dlp still reading it runs at low priority.

Lumtub 0.2.25

Explore

• The language filter offers all 72 interface languages, 35 more than before.
• "Confirmed audio only" is on by default and stricter: a video counts only when its original audio track or automatic captions are in the language. The original track is found from YouTube's own audio tags, whatever the interface language, and a dub YouTube made the default no longer passes for it. A video whose language could not be looked up is left out.
• Popular, long videos and the most-watched live streams are ranked by views, and live streams by the people watching now, which their cards show. Videos keep YouTube's order while their language is being checked.
• Global trending is gone; All with a region or language picked covers it.
• Live zones in a new order, with Lifestyle & fashion, Food & cooking, Art & creativity, Finance & business and Health & fitness added, Tech & development in place of Tech events, and 24/7 live holding the sleep radio and nature cams.

Network

• A proxy auto-config (PAC) script set in Windows, macOS or GNOME is followed: its proxy is used for Lumtub's connections.
• With a SOCKS proxy, host names are looked up by the proxy everywhere, and videos play through Lumtub's relay as with an HTTP proxy, live streams above 1080p included.
• Casting works in full quality through a SOCKS proxy.
• Deno installs and updates when GitHub's API limit is reached.

Feedback

• Settings › About › Feedback opens forms for bug reports and feature requests.

Performance

• The window around the pages is rebuilt only when the appearance or language changes.
• Once a video has started from the quick start, the yt-dlp still reading it runs at low priority.