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diora-web/docs/youtube.md
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YouTube-Kanäle als Podcasts abonnieren 
Eine YouTube-Adresse (Kanal, Playlist, Video, Feed) lässt sich wie ein
Podcast abonnieren und in der Suche einfügen. Der Server liest dafür nur
die Kanalseite (einmal) und danach den RSS-Feed des Kanals; Ton oder Video
holt er nie: Die Adresse einer Folge ist die Videoseite (watch?v=…), und
jede App sucht sich den reinen Audio-Stream selbst (docs/youtube.md).
Shorts bleiben draußen, Stille-Analyse und ID3-Kapitel gibt es für solche
Folgen nicht.

Der Player im Browser verweist auf die Apps; die Desktop-App fragt ihren
Hauptprozess (yt-dlp) nach dem Stream. Eine Dauer, die der Feed nicht hat,
meldet der Player mit dem Fortschritt (progress/save: duration_seconds).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-16 10:33:26 +02:00

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YouTube channels as podcasts

A YouTube channel (or playlist) can be subscribed to like a podcast. Only its sound is played, and the server never downloads or streams a video or its sound: each app finds the audio stream itself.

Server (diora-web, podcasts/youtube.py)

  • POST /podcasts/feeds/add/ takes a YouTube address as rss_url: a channel (/@name, /channel/UC…, /c/…, /user/…), a playlist (?list=…), a video (subscribes its channel) or the feed itself. The server reads the channel page once (feed address, name, picture) and stores the feed https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC… (or ?playlist_id=…). GET /podcasts/search/?q=<YouTube address> answers with that one channel.
  • From then on the feed is refreshed like any other. It carries the latest 15 videos. Shorts are left out. There is no duration (duration_seconds 0) until a player knows it: POST /podcasts/progress/save/ takes an optional duration_seconds (number, 1 s … 7 days), stored only while the episode has none.
  • An episode from such a feed has
    • audio_url = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<11-character id>. This is the marker: a client recognises a YouTube episode by this prefix;
    • guid = yt:video:<id>, artwork_url = the video's thumbnail, description = the video description as HTML (links, line breaks; timestamps like 00:00 Intro work as usual).
  • Nothing on the server touches the sound of such an episode: no ID3 chapters, no transcripts, and /podcasts/episodes/<id>/silences/ answers {"ready": true, "spans": [], "error": "youtube"} (skip silence is up to the app, as on Android anyway).

Apps

A client that sees a watch?v= address resolves it itself, on the device, to an audio-only stream (no video track), and plays or downloads that.

Client How
Android NewPipeExtractor: the original audio track, progressive, opus before m4a, ≤ 160 kbit/s; resolved when the stream is opened and once more on a 403; downloads in 10 MB ranges (in one go YouTube throttles to ~50 KB/s)
Desktop yt-dlp in the main process (-f bestaudio), Electron itself as its JavaScript runtime; yt-dlp is fetched from its GitHub release on first use and kept up to date (src/main/youtube.js)
Browser can't (YouTube doesn't let a web page read its pages, and a stream address only works for the device that asked for it): the episode is listed but says it plays in the app

Stream addresses are bound to the device's IP address and run out after a few hours: resolve shortly before playing, and again when the player reports an error (podcasts-web.js reloads after a media error anyway).

Progress, queue, played state etc. work as for any episode: they belong to the episode on the server, not to the stream address.