feat(YouTube): Hide podcasts in the home feed

[Bottomfard6127]

Feature description

Just a simple option to hide podcast in the home feed

Motivation

Its kinda annoying to constantly see this type of playlist in the homepage, especially when I already got used to mixes being hidden

Acknowledgements

• This issue is not a duplicate of an existing feature request.
• I have chosen an appropriate title.
• All requested information has been provided properly.

[Bottomfard6127]

If you want more reference on how annoying this stuff, this is the state of my home feed ever since this stuff appeared:

[LisoUseInAIKyrios]

Maybe it can be hidden using a custom filter. Try this:

[oSumAtrIX]

Since the feed consists of the same components, you'd either hide the child component too late or be unable to distinguish between other feed items. The constructed view groups by Litho contain strings visible on the screen, which could technically be used to hide the views.

[LisoUseInAIKyrios]

A proto buffer filter likely would work, but currently the custom filter does not support that. But adding support would be fairly simple.

The only question is how to present it in the settings, and figure out some kind of syntax to indicate a path and the protobuffer string that appear with the path. That could be as simple as using a $ or # character to separate the parts, ie: home_feed_whatever_path$Podcast

[oSumAtrIX]

Sometimes we use abstract filter techniques such as checking first for the path, then for the buffer, or similar. In most cases, a simple buffer filter will be less than ideal

[oSumAtrIX]

I was referring to strings after the views being constructed. ViewGroups are nested and flattened Yoga artifacts from what I have understood, so you do can not edit say the text without rendering the ViewGroups again, but you can access the views and their children fairly granular as they resemble the same structure as the path builder string. Iirc calling toString on those views will sometimes return the string they are displaying so that would be a useful way to filter, even after the recursive method we currently hook that reads the protobuf stream to construct the ConversionContext pathbuilder

[LisoUseInAIKyrios]

Sometimes we use abstract filter techniques such as checking first for the path, then for the buffer, or similar. In most cases, a simple buffer filter will be less than ideal

What I meant was a syntax that filters if both the path and the buffer is found. Similar to how the action buttons and some other proto buffer elements are hidden. This would be only for custom filter, and yes it would be missing other techniques such as exclusionary filtering or 'starts with' checking. But something like this would work for some situations (and maybe a situation like this).

[Bottomfard6127]

A proto buffer filter likely would work, but currently the custom filter does not support that. But adding support would be fairly simple.

The only question is how to present it in the settings, and figure out some kind of syntax to indicate a path and the protobuffer string that appear with the path. That could be as simple as using a $ or # character to separate the parts, ie: home_feed_whatever_path$Podcast

Well I wouldn't mind too if the hide podcast will hide it altogether in other fields such as in any channel page or something like that, cause some people like me ever use that.

Edit: btw additional info, this is not exclusive to like my revanced youtube account, this is also appearing from my regular youtube app, so I thought that eventually you guys would bump into this one way or another.

[LisoUseInAIKyrios]

I tried modifying custom filter to allow proto buffer filtering, and it does work without too much difficulty.

I could not get the Podcast playlist to appear, so instead I tried filtering a specific channel from the search results.

Here's a search result with a channel filtered using the path: search_video_with_context.eml and the proto buffer string: - Go to channel - RedLetterMedia -

This hides all videos from the channel named "Red Letter Media" but still allows all videos from other channels. The 'key moments' for some now hidden videos is still visible (explained more below):

Unfiltered original search results

Custom filter that removes RLM channel from search results

Some limitations of allowing proto buffer strings in custom filter:

• Filtering can falsely hide some items, as the proto buffer has freeform text and thus other stuff could match. For this specific usage (hide specific channels) it's can falsely hide some videos if they contain - Go to channel - RedLetterMedia - in the video title (but that seems unlikely).
• A lot of buffer strings are language specific, which means a lot of custom filters would also be language specific.
• Filtering certain items can leave related residue that may be impossible to remove (which is not new to custom filtering, but even more noticeable here). This is seen in the 'key moments' at the top of the screenshot above (there are no channel specific proto buffer strings to filter on for that element).
• The proto buffer strings are case sensitive, so filtering on general keywords may not hide some items if the word casing is different. Not a problem for some situations, but for general content filtering it might be.
• The litho search currently only supports ASCII characters so many foreign languages will not work. Although the litho (prefix tree) search could later be modified to support unicode without too much fuss. (if there's even a demand for that)

But at a minimum, allowing custom filter to filter the proto buffer works ok for trying out new filtering patch ideas before spending more time to create a polished dedicated patch. So it might be useful just for development purposes and maybe some advanced end users can also get some use out of it.

[oSumAtrIX]

Considering that, maybe a custom preference, similar to a list preference that takes two inputs, one for the path and one for strings and filters accordingly could be made later so that we don't need to use a custom string syntax.

[Bottomfard6127]

But is it possible to just outright hide podcast similar to mixes?

[LisoUseInAIKyrios]

But is it possible to just outright hide podcast similar to mixes?

I cannot say myself, because I cannot get any podcast mixes to show up in the home feed or search.

[Bottomfard6127]

But is it possible to just outright hide podcast similar to mixes?

I cannot say myself, because I cannot get any podcast mixes to show up in the home feed or search.

I see, so we will just have to wait and see?

[LisoUseInAIKyrios]

I see, so we will just have to wait and see?

Yes

[Bottomfard6127]

I see, so we will just have to wait and see?

Yes

Okay that's reassuring thanks for looking this up too

[LisoUseInAIKyrios]

@Bottomfard6127

Custom filter now supports buffer (content) strings.

This might work to hide the content:
^home_video_with_content.eml$Podcast

The downside is this will also hide all videos with 'Podcast' in the title or in the video channel name, which might make this unusable for some people.

[Bottomfard6127]

Hello @LisoUseInAIKyrios I tried the custom filter string to hide the podcast mix but it didn't work, although it did hide those videos or channel names with podcast in them but the mix playlist with podcast on them is still there in the homepage

[oSumAtrIX]

I can not see any podcasts on my end, so I'll need access to an account that does. Contact me at osumatrix@revanced.app

[Bottomfard6127]

I can not see any podcasts on my end, so I'll need access to an account that does. Contact me at osumatrix@revanced.app

My algorithm has changed so its not displaying some podcast as of now, can I contact you again if it ever appear so that I can lend you access to my account to inspect it?

[oSumAtrIX]

Yes, just reopen the issue once it comes up again, closing until then.