YT Zero now has an experimental player!

[Pelski]

I’ve been working on something slightly questionable: YT Zero now has a new experimental YouTube player.

The goal is simple — play videos without relying on the regular embedded player. When you start a video, YT Zero begins downloading it in chunks, processes those chunks as they arrive, transcodes them when needed, and streams the result directly to your browser.

That means you don’t have to wait for the entire video to download before playback starts. YT Zero tries to prepare just enough data to keep things moving, while the rest is fetched and processed in the background as you watch.

There are some catches

This feature is still very experimental, so there are definitely some rough edges.

Starting a video may take a little longer than with the regular embedded player. Seeking is where things get noticeably more complicated. If you jump far ahead in a video, YT Zero may need to fetch a different part of the source, process it, transcode it, and only then send it back to the player. Because of that, large jumps in the timeline can take significantly longer than normal playback.

Performance will also depend on your server, network connection, the video itself, and the formats YouTube happens to provide. There are quite a few moving parts here, which is exactly why I’m calling this experimental.

Why release it now?

Because it works well enough to be interesting, and testing something like this on one machine, one network, and a handful of videos only gets me so far.

I’d much rather let people try it on different setups — fast servers, slow servers, weird hardware, different networks, and videos that somehow manage to break every assumption I made.

If you feel like experimenting with it, feedback would be very useful.

How to enable it

You must have the minimum version v0.15.1.

Go to:

Settings → Plugins → YT-DLP Integration

At the very bottom you’ll find the option to enable the experimental player.

Turn it on, try a few videos, break it in creative ways, and let me know how it behaves on your setup.

Just don’t expect Netflix-level seeking yet. I will pursue this, but it is not easy.

Please do not report them as bugs on issues page, write them here in the comments.

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Happy watching!
Pelski

[Taruvi]

Hi, I've been giving this a go. I have some thoughts.

However, I'm not sure I have everything straight because you've released a few updates, so my testing has been from the previous two or three (?) versions. I forget how many. I'm writing this with my current installed version of v0.15.5 (597fb72).

Anyway, what it seems to be doing is just downloading with yt-dlp as normal. I see some *.ts files going into a hls-stream directory, but then they all seem to be merged into a single file in downloads as it was previously.

The big difference is the length of time it takes to begin playing videos in the first place.

I had tried in previous versions to download first with the yt-dlp plugin, but I found that some videos I watched, even one video I watched this way with a duration of more than 1 hour played on Youtube the whole time before switching to the downloaded version a few minutes from the end.

For context, I have:

So my connection is not a problem.

In the end, I switched back to playing exclusively on Youtube with the yt-dlp plugin enabled so that I still have the option to click to download any video on demand.

So it seems to me that this experimental player is basically the same as the 'download with yt-dlp and watch the downloaded version'.

So the new experimental player is not very distinct from the previous method. They both download to disk and merge the segments.

What could set it apart is to maybe cache the segments to RAM, rather than to disk. Here, I'm thinking of saving SSD writes mainly. If I watch enough videos, those writes will all add up...

Anyway, I'm sure you're not finished with whatever plans you have for this so I'll wait and see what you come up with.

I do feel kind of bad that I set off all this extra work by reporting that the UI doesn't hide when I press a key...

[Pelski]

Thank you very much for your opinion, this is still an experimental function of an experimental function and I am glad that you checked and described very well what it looks like on your side ❤️

As for the difference between downloading and "streaming", the only one is that here you can play videos without waiting for the entire file to download. I will see what I can do with it and in what direction I will be able to go, because I hope that one day it will be faster, more responsive and more convenient than maintaining functionality with two completely different players 😛

I do feel kind of bad that I set off all this extra work by reporting that the UI doesn't hide when I press a key...

The plan was to start optimizing it somehow earlier, because many problems are related to the use of an embedded player. It just so happened that I started doing it right now 🙂

Thank you again, I will definitely take into account what you wrote 🙂

[Taruvi]

I actually did have two or three feature requests that I now think might not be possible with the embedded player after I've read things you've been saying about it. But maybe they'd be possible with the custom player instead.

These would be things like being able to use more keyboard shortcuts, taking screenshots, and automatically going fullscreen when you click on a video.

[Pelski]

If you can, please make an issue and list them all, I will try to do it, although I already know that some of them may be problematic 😛