TigerTube

A native Cocoa YouTube client for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on PowerPC, paired with a transcoding proxy that runs on a modern host.

How it works

TigerTube is split across two machines:

• TigerTube.app (on a PowerPC Mac) bundles its own openssl so it can reach modern HTTPS, and talks directly to YouTube's Data API for search, metadata, and thumbnails.
• tigertube-proxy.py (on a modern laptop) uses yt-dlp to resolve a video and ffmpeg to transcode it in real-time to MPEG-1 video + PCM audio — formats which even a G3 can keep up with.

When you click a search result, the client opens two HTTP streams to the proxy (one video, one audio) and decodes them live.

Running the release build

Grab TigerTube-0.3.zip from the Releases page. It contains:

• TigerTube.app — PowerPC Release build, targets 10.4+
• proxy/tigertube-proxy.py — transcoding proxy (Python 3, yt-dlp, ffmpeg, zeroconf)

1. Start the proxy on a modern host

Requires Python 3, ffmpeg, yt-dlp, and python-zeroconf:

pip install yt-dlp zeroconf
python3 proxy/tigertube-proxy.py

The proxy listens on port 5002 and advertises itself via mDNS.

2. Launch TigerTube.app on the Tiger Mac

TigerTube will auto-discover the proxy on a healthy LAN — no configuration needed. The window title shows which proxy it found (e.g. uranium.local:5002).

Player keyboard controls

Key	Action
Space	Pause / resume
f	Toggle fullscreen
ESC	Exit fullscreen / close
q	Quit player
← / →	Seek ±15 s
↓ / ↑	Seek ±60 s

What's new in 0.3

See the v0.3 release notes for the full list. Highlights:

• Transport bar under the video — play/pause button, draggable scrub slider, and live time/duration label. Spacebar also pauses.
• Skip-decode under A/V drift — on CPU-bound playback libmpeg2 drops to I-frames-only when it falls more than 0.5 s behind the audio clock, then resumes full decode once caught up. Keeps A/V tight on 640x480+ instead of accumulating drift.
• Dropped-frames counter above the search field reflects source-timeline frames the viewer never saw, derived from the audio clock (not just internal queue overflow).
• Bring-your-own API key via ~/.tigertube/youtube-api-key.txt to bypass the shared default quota.
• Leaner proxy — yt-dlp used as a library, Flask dependency dropped, fail-fast install hints when ffmpeg or zeroconf is missing.

What's new in 0.2

See the v0.2 release notes for the full list. Highlights:

• Bonjour proxy discovery — the client auto-finds the proxy on the LAN via _tigertube-proxy._tcp (mDNS). No hardcoded IPs.
• mplayer-style keyboard seeking — ←/→ = ±15 s, ↓/↑ = ±60 s.
• Resolution + quality dropdowns under the search field (192x144 through 1344x1008; MPEG-1 qscale 2–8).
• Quality-mode (VBR) transcode in the proxy — q=N for constant-quality VBR instead of CBR, avoiding pixelation spikes on high-motion frames.

Known good on

• 600 MHz iMac G3 (PowerPC G3, no AltiVec, ATI Rage 128 Pro, 10.4)

320x240 is rock solid. 400x300 will drop some frames but is watchable. Video is drawn using OpenGL, so fullscreen scaling is free (press "f"), even on a Rage 128 Pro.

Should work on any PowerPC Mac running 10.4 or later. This release is intended for G3 processors (MPEG-1 video at small resolutions, uncompressed audio). Later releases will include better codecs for Altivec-class Macs.

YouTube API key

TigerTube ships with a built-in YouTube Data API v3 key so it works out of the box, but the key's daily quota (~100 searches) is shared across everyone running the app. If you start seeing search errors about usage limits, create your own key and drop it in a plain text file at ~/.tigertube/youtube-api-key.txt — TigerTube reads that path on startup and uses it in place of the built-in key, no rebuild required.

Create a key at the Google Cloud Console (enable "YouTube Data API v3" under APIs & Services). The free quota for a personal key is 10,000 units/day, enough for ~100 searches per day on your own.

Building from source

You'll need a PowerPC Mac running 10.4 with Xcode 2.5 installed. Before the first build, create src/Secrets.h containing your own YouTube Data API v3 key:

#define YOUTUBE_API_KEY "abc123..."

See the YouTube API key section above for how to obtain a key. At runtime the compiled-in key is used as a default but is overridden by ~/.tigertube/youtube-api-key.txt if that file exists.

Then from the repo root on the Tiger Mac:

xcodebuild -configuration Debug     # or Release

All native dependencies (libcurl, OpenSSL, libmpeg2) are vendored under libs/ as PowerPC static builds. SBJson (backported to Objective-C 1.0) is vendored under SBJson-2.2.3/.