Feature Proposal: Date Filter & Decoupling History from Watched Status

[Zenkazio]

Hi everyone,

I’ve implemented two features locally to make FreeTube more usable for me. Before I open GitHub issues and PRs, I’d like to discuss the details and gather feedback.

Date Filter

This feature is straightforward. It would add two settings:

• A toggle to enable/disable the filter
• A date picker to select a start date

When enabled and a date is selected, only videos published after that date will appear on the main page (subscriptions). The "Load more videos" button would also be hidden while this filter is active.

Decoupling History from Watched Status

As I understand it, the current workflow is:

1. User clicks a video on the main page → It’s added to the history
2. video ID exists in history to determine whether it should be considered watched
3. If "Hide watched videos" is enabled, the UI filters out any "watched" video

This is frustrating for me because I rarely watch longer videos in one sitting. Once clicked, they’re immediately marked as watched and disappear (since I keep "Hide watched videos" on). I’d prefer to find them later on the main page instead of digging through my history.

My implementation:
Each video now has a separate isWatched flag. Clicking a video still adds it to the history immediately, but it doesn’t mark it as watched. The isWatched flag is only set when:

• The user explicitly clicks "Mark as watched" in the context menu (which also appends to history if needed)
• Or when ~98% of the video has been played (this threshold is arbitrary and could be adjusted, not by user feels a bit too much for the settings)

With this change, my main feed stays clean. Only videos from the point I started using FreeTube remain visible, and they only disappear once I’ve genuinely finished them or explicitly marked them as watched.

Additional Idea: "Not Interested" Option

To add even more granularity, I’d suggest adding a "Not interested" option alongside "Mark as watched". When clicked, it would set a notInterested flag. If a "Hide not interested videos" setting is enabled (default: true), the video would disappear from the main feed and would not be added to the watch history at all.

I believe maintaining this semantic distinction between "watched", "not watched", and "not interested" would be a nice additional touch.

Please let me know your thoughts on these features, especially around the proposed behavior and settings. Once I have some feedback, I’ll clean up the code, write proper documentation, and open GitHub issues/PRs for review.

[Zenkazio]

further inspection showed me that "not interested" would still need a history item. so I guess it should be hidden in the subs page and in the history.

[Zenkazio]

why does the markAsWatched() function (FtListVideo.vue, line 1152) resets the watch progress? instead of just taking watchProgress(.value) (line 446). is it intentional to reset it? otherwise I would fix it as part of the decoupling.

[absidue]

That is not a bug in the code in the FreeTube repo, because it is unreachable through the menu when the video is already watched (because FreeTube shows a button the remove the video from the history when the video is watched) and when you open a video in an external player FreeTube has no way of knowing what your watch progress is so setting it to zero is correct.
If you made changes in your fork that don't agree with the existing code, so create what you perceive as bug, that only exists in your fork then any fixes for it should only be in your fork too, because those changes would break expected behaviour in this repo.

[Zenkazio]

but watchProgress would return 0 in that case too(?) How does the external player correlate with markAsWatched()? as you said if it is not in the history it can be marked as watched watchProgress would return 0 in that case; and then it can only be removed from history. Does an external Player call this function? even if markAsWatched would get called with an history entry present (like you said not possible because mutual exclusive) then it would return the not updated watchProgess of 0 anyway.

[absidue]

The markAsWatched function you are talking about is called in multiple places in that component, including when you click the external player button FreeTube as opening a video in an external player counts as a watch too.

[absidue]

All of those changes sound quite niche, so probably not something we would want in the main FreeTube repo.

We generally only add new settings and features when we think that they will be useful to a large number of people and are worth the time and effort required to implement and maintain them. For niche things like that we suggest that you take advantage of the fact that FreeTube is open source and maintain a custom build for yourself with your custom changes, like you already have done.

[Zenkazio]

Okay.