✨ViveStream 3.0.0: The Discovery & Power-User Update

Welcome to the next evolution of ViveStream! Version 3.0.0 is a landmark release focused on two core principles: giving you powerful new ways to discover and organize your library, and providing you with the expert-level control to download your media exactly how you want it. This update transforms ViveStream into a true power-user's tool for building the perfect offline collection.

✨ New Features & Major Enhancements

• 🎵 The Artist Discovery Engine

  • A completely new "Artists" section has been added to the sidebar, automatically detecting and grouping your media by artist or channel.
  • Browse a beautiful grid of all your artists, each with their own cover art.
  • Click any artist to navigate to a dedicated detail page showing all of their content in your library.

• 🎧 Audio-Only Downloads

  • You can now choose to download content as Audio-Only directly from the downloads page.
  • Select from a variety of high-quality formats, including MP3 (Best/Standard), FLAC (Lossless), M4A, WAV, and Opus.
  • The player now enters a dedicated Audio Mode, displaying the large cover art instead of a black screen for a focused listening experience.

• ✂️ Partial & Chapter-Based Downloads

  • Download Clips: Use the new "Advanced Options" to specify a start and end time (e.g., 1:23 to 2:45) to download only a specific segment of a video.
  • Split by Chapters: For long videos like albums or podcasts, you can now choose to download them as multiple, separate files, automatically split by their chapters.

• 🚫 SponsorBlock Integration

  • Enable the "Remove Sponsored Segments" option in Settings to automatically cut sponsored sections, intros, outros, and other fluff from your downloaded YouTube videos.

🛠️ Power-User Tools & Reliability

• 🧠 Dynamic Context-Aware Search Bar

  • The main search bar is now intelligent! It automatically knows which page you're on and filters the correct content in real-time—videos, playlists, or artists.

• 📂 Total Metadata & Naming Control

  • Embedded Metadata: All downloads now embed critical metadata like the title, artist, album art, and chapters directly into the media file, making your library portable and beautiful in any media player.
  • Superior Subtitles: Subtitles are now embedded directly into video files, and you can enable an option to fetch auto-generated subtitles if official ones aren't available.
  • Custom File Naming: A new "File Naming" section in Settings allows you to define your own output template, giving you complete control over how your files are named and organized.
  • Download Descriptions: Video descriptions are now saved and can be viewed in a new collapsible section on the player page.

• ⚡ Performance & Maintenance

  • Concurrent Fragments: A new setting allows you to speed up certain downloads by fetching multiple parts in parallel.
  • In-App Downloader Updater: Keep ViveStream's core downloader up-to-date with a single click in the new "Maintenance" section of the settings, ensuring long-term reliability.

🐛 Critical Bug Fixes & Stability

• ✅ FIXED: Critical Download Failures (403 Forbidden Error)

  • The most common and frustrating download errors have been resolved by implementing a browser impersonation technique, making downloads vastly more reliable.

• ✅ FIXED: Download Process Hangs

  • A critical bug that caused yt-dlp processes to hang in the background, preventing downloads from ever completing, has been completely fixed by removing a problematic experimental feature.

• ✅ FIXED: Custom Naming & Chapter Split Failures

  • Resolved bugs where using custom filenames or splitting by chapters would cause the post-processing to fail, preventing the media from appearing in the app. These features are now stable and reliable.

• ✅ FIXED: Seamless Application Upgrades

  • The installer has been corrected to ensure that new versions properly upgrade your existing installation instead of creating a second copy of the app.

📝 Notes from the Developer

This has been an intense development cycle, and the result is an application that I am incredibly proud of. We've moved beyond simple downloading and into the realm of intelligent library management. The focus of this release was control—control over what you download, how it's named, and how you can discover it later. The bug fixes were challenging, and I can't thank you enough for your exceptional debugging and detailed reports that made solving them possible.

ViveStream is now more powerful, more stable, and more user-friendly than ever before. Thank you for being a part of this journey.

Full Changelog: 2.1.0...3.0.0