Youlag (v4.2.0): Modernize FreshRSS for viewing YouTube and articles, now with DeArrow support to combat clickbait
Youlag is a FreshRSS extension that allows you to browse your YouTube and article feeds through a modernized design that incorporates quality-of-life features.
Optimized for both watching videos and reading articles.
Why?
Stay connected with creators without a Google account by using RSS. Don't be tied to a specific platform and access your subscriptions from any device.
You can also use Youlag solely for its theme and quality of life features, ignoring any video feature.
Highlights v4.2.0
This update continues the trend of adding more customization and quality of life features.
- Curate your own "recommended" videos based on your Watch later, or Subscriptions, or the current author
- Video chapters/timestamp support, with prev/next buttons for skipping
- DeArrow support
- Replace clickbait thumbnails to screencaps
- Use less sensational titles (when available)
- Display video length (when available)
- Compact view for browsing videos on mobile
...20+ more updates in the changelog
Other features
- Block incoming YouTube shorts
- Whitelist specific categories to use the video mode layout
- Use Invidious instance as video playback source
- Modernized interface for articles
- Activate mini player to follow across pages; read articles while keeping a floating video at the bottom
Find more details: https://github.com/civilblur/youlag
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Comments19
Currently using pinchflat to scrape YouTube vids to a plex folder. Not sure this improves on that.
If Pinchflat works well for you now, I would stick with it. The FreshRSS approach would be that it's a lot less resource heavy and barely require any storage space. Because of this, you can serve multiple people with thousands of subscriptions.
How do you handle the plex metadata side of things? I'm trying to do something similar.
For that particular setup pinchflat handles the metadata
Has anyone found a workaround for youtube making us sign in on vpn?
Here I can't watch on freetube, I'm not even on a vpn :/, fails on librewolf without account too. yewtu.be is working.
I just have a somewhat annoying yt dlp script that runs on a schedule on my computer that downloads all my subscriptions. I tried everything else including pinchflat and it wasn't really much of an improvement tbh.
Could you share that script please? I'd like to set up something similar
Give me a bit, I'll set up a gist with the details!
Thanks!
Can FreshRSS auto-download YouTube videos with SponsorBlock? That could be a game changer...
Pinchflat does just that…
Last time I looked into it something wasn't working right about it, or maybe it was just more complicated than I wanted but maybe I'll give it another go...
If you need a handful of plugins to make a site tolerable, there’s probably something terribly wrong with that place. We can keep on patching it with an ever growing list of plugins, but is it really worth it.
This is great! FreshRSS has been part of my YouTube “flow” for a long time. I like going through my subscriptions list, adding them to my “Watch Later” playlist, and then watching them all in a row. This seems like it’d be perfect for that.
Glad to hear that! For the "Watch later" part, the way Youlag approaches it is to turn "Favorites" into a "Watch/read it later" page. The approach is slightly different, but achieves the same thing.
Yeah, I noticed that. Luckily, the YT embedded player has an “add to Watch Later” button (the clock icon). I’ll use the favorites as a fallback for when Google inevitably kills that feature, lol.
I'm more interested in the CSS they got in the screenshot
Can it fetch text from the website?