I'd also suggest maybe adding the channel names (like the comment you posted here) to the app itself (although i think it's cool when it's unnamed and you get the old-school feeling of channels just being numbers).

Also, I'd love to have permalinks for the channels. Not for the individual videos themselves, but just a link that when sharing would bring somebody else to the same channel you're watching right now.

Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono (since a lot of channels are annoying to me using headphones, they pan the audio sources too hard left/right and it's super distracting), but it doesn't seem to work on this website, probably because of the way they're embedded. I don't know if this can be changed somehow, or have a mode to force mono audio (which would be also oldschool like old TVs with one speaker only!). It's probably too niche and hard to do though.

Also I don't seem to find any volume control except mute?

It also had the worst search UX I have ever experienced.

Most importantly, recording an event did not guarantee you got the whole thing! There were numerous events I was watching from my ‘library’ that did not include the final 10-30 min of action. WTH? Did you really record based on time stamps alone? What year is this?!

If you want to watch “the most likely thing you would want to watch” (NFL, Olympics main feed), YouTubeTV is great.

But as soon as you want to find something off the top few recommendations, it gets much harder. Compare that to regular TV, when I could just remember 27 is Discovery Channel and get there instantly.

In windows you can also go to "Ease of access audio settings" and click "Turn on mono audio". Useful for games which have positional audio which gets annoying (sf6 training room for example).

I find this interesting. Are you oversensitive? I've never even considered that this could be an issue. Do you experience the same problem with other things like music and games?

For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.

    mpv --audio-channels=mono 'urlhere'

    --vf=lavfi="hflip"

Another fun one I bind in input.conf

    ctrl+shift+r cycle_values video-rotate "90" "180" "270" "0"

I also have these binds for unbalanced audio, mainly used with 5.1 audio to sound better on headphones or stereo speakers, and the \ bind one seems to make normal stuff slightly louder also, so sometimes I hit it when I don't wanna turn up my speaker knob for one video.

    \ af         toggle lavfi=[dynaudnorm=f=100]

    | af         toggle lavfi=loudnorm

I have carla running at all times and put all of my system audio through various loopback devices (browser, voice conferencing, and music/system) and then apply varying degrees of compression to them (no surprise sounds, hard limiting to hear quiet people, and bypass -- respectively).

Of course everything goes through an extra limiter at the end to avoid clipping.

I also send the voice conferencing input and output through RNNoise, so I can avoid emitting terrible sounds and avoid hearing them as well.

People also seem to like me better when I cut my mids a little bit, but additional research is required.

The reason for this is that I can change browsers (or games or voice apps) and they all think I'm just using a normal mic and headset, but it's actually like 10 LSP plugins and various routing.

Still doesn't feel that complicated when you do a little bit at a time.

I don't watch that channel any more.

If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.

That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.

I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.

Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)

"If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over."

This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...

However, I also hate knowing that I'm hearing mono audio where stereo could be used. 99% of the videos I watch don't have panning issues, so to just turn off ALL stereo seems like such overkill to me...

So when things are mixed "improperly" (it's subjective), it's very distracting to me. I don't need to force mono everywhere, but it's very common in amateurish channels, and surprisingly also in movies and TV shows. Big productions tend to mix assuming you'll play on speakers (where it's fine to have something playing on just one channel/speaker, since both your ears will hear it), but when it mixes down to stereo and you listen on headphones, it's soooo common for them to pan something 100% to one channel when the source is supposed to be on that side. Like, somebody speaking to the left of the camera, and it comes 100% on the left channel and 0% on the right one. It's so unnatural and annoying to me.

I find this genuinely baffling; I lived for nearly a decade as a bachelor in a basement apartment where I had a big TV setup, but out of respect for my upstairs landlord listened to nearly everything on wireless stereo headphones, and I can’t recall ever experiencing this.

Perhaps they're using a weird media player?

Exactly, and this highlights the big difference between using headphones and using speakers. When you listen to some stereophonic music with one of the instruments panned completely to one side, through speakers that sound will only play from that side, however the sound will bounce around your room and you'll hear it in both ears, and the difference will tell you where it's coming from. But when you listen through headphones, you don't get this effect, and it sounds weird. With modern computing devices, it shouldn't be that hard to run the music through a filter that mixes the two channels when using headphones to avoid this problem. I wouldn't want to mix them to mono (that sounds bad too), but just a slight reduction of the stereo separation would be good.

I wouldn't know because I consider all those effect libraries, mixers and presets ("Concert Hall" - who would ever want that?) that usually come with the audio chipset driver suite as bloatware and try to get rid of them, or at least never touch them - but it would surprise me if there weren't anything that affects the amount of stereo separation...?

Its really nice to just sit down and watch "whatever is on" (even though I could switch over to the main library and watch any episode I want).

Sometimes I just want a 0-effort/0-decision background noise while I work on something else or browse on my phone.

It is so much easier to flip it on to my Sci-fi Channel, animation channel, movie channel, or James Bond marathon channel then to decide what to watch. And since I've seen all this content, it is often kinda nice to start in the middle of an episode.

I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps that I use as some filler content if I want episodes to start on the hour.

I've been thinking a lot about setting up some kids channels with specific hours (like channel comes on at 7am, goes off during part of the day, comes back on in the afternoon, and goes offline at bedtime) for my siblings kids, as I think letting them just browser youtube kids is terrible.

One nifty feature is that you can configure “filler” content to inject randomly between episodes. I used this to add short educational clips from a kids TV channel in the Middle East.

I’ve designed my media set-up around Jellyfin on a weak server that can’t handle transcoding, and very-capable clients that don’t need it. This lets me avoid like half the bugs on the Jellyfin bug tracker and all the instability an Nvidia or AMD video card would introduce to the server itself.

I’m very interested in this, but can’t use it if it must transcode.

I believe there is a container you can use where it doesn't transcode, but it trips up every player I have tried, as they do not like having different resolutions/codecs suddenly swap.

Intel Quicksync is very capable (even more so than most AMD/Nvidia cards) and any 7th gen or newer Intel CPU with integrated graphics has it and has good codec support.

I’ve even seen it turn into a slideshow remuxing original video with transcoded audio. It’s not very capable.

Where were you able to find these? Recreating one of these channels has been a side project I’ve wanted to do for ages.

Try searching for "$channel bump"

Personally, I think Adult Swim had the best bumps, usually just some nice house music with a nice animation and some funny quotes.

I quite like it. Unfortunately, the app's been a bit buggy - not always picking up the stream at the "current time" and sometimes navigation gets wonky. But it was a good test run and that, along with your post, has convinced me to give Ersatz (or something like it) a try.

I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon. Since it will also allow them to do a Spotify-style payola approach to scheduling.

I doubt it would. The modern style of binging on-demand streaming content seems to be too effective at capturing attention. Remember that lots of people get notifications on their phone the instant a new video comes out for a subscribed channel, especially kids and teens who haven't developed resistance to these business models.

YT would be unlikely to spend any effort implementing an alternate mode that doesn't capture attention as effectively; the old model of live channels is likely a niche preference. If somehow this did prove to be more effective at capturing attention, I could see it being implemented, but that would surprise me.

I highly doubt it. They're going to wait for competitors to implement it and have it for several years before they bother to poorly copy the idea.

It was essentially a 24/7 livestream which played from their back catalogue, with the ability to add "promo" segments in between videos, which they used for products on their merch store.

Seemed to dissapear around the same time the whole monoblock scandal and production shutdown happened last year, so I'm not sure if the YouTube experiment also concluded or if they turned it off during the shutdown.

My other wishlist item was that Netflix would offer a “shuffle” this series option. For standalone episodic shows, ordering does not matter, and it is a bunch of overhead to pick something.

Most things or demos I send are horizontal, but I agree, the automatic shorts of vertical is annoying

(cue Buggles..)

Google TV also has a "Live" tab that collects all the live channels across all your apps and puts it into a TV guide grid. I've installed Fubo and Tubi and others just to build out my TV guide.

Works pretty well.

Fun times.

In the intro to most shows/videos, there's annoying jingles, silly animations, a redundant summary of what's about to happen in an already short segment, or just useless chatter "hey guys! it's your boy, _. welcome to my channel, remember to smash that like button, we have a great show today".

Because of all this intro bloat, I tend to jump a few minutes into most YouTube videos by default.

That being said, I think the last thing society needs is to make these platforms more addictive. The algorithms already do a good enough job of keeping us glued.

Three reasons:

1. Picking something to watch takes time. Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I'm dining alone. My meal gets cold before I start the video

2. Choosing something to watch is stressful. If I'm tired and I don't know what I want to see makes me more tired and frustrated. These are the times that I don't want the freedom to watch I want because they are the times that I don't want to think about what I want

3. The random factor of watching something that I would never watch by myself it's something that makes me go outside my bubble. I can't say how many good movies (or songs, etc) I found by that randomness

I'm not against the freedom of streaming services but there are moments that I just don't want that freedom. So, thank you!

Or to make another analogy, if you go out and sit at a bench, who knows what will pass by?

Google doesn't make money by avoiding sending streaming data; they make money by showing ads, which (mostly) aren't shown while you're scrolling.

You can certainly fake it as a workaround. For example, you'll notice that "I'm feeling lucky" on Google simply follows the first search result. Streaming services could take what is already computed as the first result on the "Home" page and use that, for example.

But at that point why not just click on the first video? Unlike Google, which doesn't give you much until you enter a search query, all of the streaming services I know of have already given you your "lucky" matches by the time a "I'm feeling lucky button" could be presented. Two buttons side-by-side that do the exact same thing doesn't offer much.

The only response I have is that purposefully-clicking the 'random' button has a psychological effect over clicking the first video returned which (gut check) makes me think it will be more easily tolerated if it ends up being "off-beat" since I didn't explicitly click the first selection (thus choosing it).

if that feature existed it would never be a random video from all the available videos. It'd be a random-seeming video from a carefully curated selection of videos that youtube wants to push at certain users, and in some cases were paid to promote. Users wouldn't know and wouldn't care anyway because they pushed a button and got content without thinking.

The reason that might be preferable to just clicking the first result is that the second actually involves a choice since you’ve seen the second item.

We ditched cable forever ago, but I do find that I miss just watching 15 minutes of some random show like I used to. I usually forget about it until I'm at someone's house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.

Cool! I have a list of movies to watch that I write from several recommendations sources, so I can try focus in watching instead of choosing. I can't say the same about music, I'm stuck for years hearing almost the same bands, which is kinda sad...

> I usually forget about it until I'm at someone's house or a doctors office and catch a snippet of some random car show or cooking show.

Another good point, watching something that I don't need to pay too much attention because I don't care about the subject, but can entertain me while I do other things... Here in Brazil that kind of shows that "we watch, we like but we don't know why" is a recurring joke, and we have three main ones: one about farming (Globo Rural), one about fishing (Pesca Alternativa) and one about trucks (Siga Bem Caminhoneiro)

I like SiriusXM for this. I'm often finding new channels to listen to, and once I pick a channel I don't have to pick out songs.

Apple Music has some features that can work similarly, such as radio stations (though a lot of theirs are really more like podcasts) or they have lots of playlists of recommended hits from different genres and you can shuffle them.

Are those public access type shows that are meant to be somewhat educational?

I think the YouTube recommendation algorithm you get from opening the app or viewing the front page is good for this. They have a lot of random content and when the algorithm gets to know you, it will suggest things of interest that can be consumed this way.

The only issue is that my youtube is the one on the main tv, so sometimes the suggestions get messed up when my kids watch. Youtube probably has a really confusing set of conflicting beliefs about who I am.

If I lend them a device to watch YouTube I usually do it in the browser in incognito.

Channel 2: Travel and Events

Channel 3: Food

Channel 4: Architecture

Channel 5: Film and Animation

Channel 6: Documentaries

Channel 7: Comedy

Channel 8: Music

Channel 9: Autos and Vehicles

Channel 10: News and Politics

Channel 11: UFC

Channel 12: Podcasts/Interviews/Talk Shows

Would love to see people just working on projects they have around the house, not taking things too serious.

And then force the user to get off the couch and walk to the monitor to turn a knob when you want to change channel...

Bonus points if you allow me to zap as efficiently as I was able to back when we had analog TVs and cable. I was the master zapper, zapping through hundreds of channels in seconds. Just buffer the adjacent channels and calculate the maximum input latency.

If this new feature would cost the streaming companies more money, they just need to tweak the business model or subscription pricing to cover it.

Netflix tried something similar a few years ago, but in my opinion it missed a critical ingredient, which was dropping people into the middle of content at a compelling point.

Really like the execution here. YouTube take note.

I actually believe TikTok is more of the spiritual inheritor of this kind of project more than any other platform.

We did a mix of human curation and random selection, noting which random selections were successful and which were not. It was effective enough. The thing about an experience like this is that it doesn't need to be perfect. Like channel surfing, if it doesn't catch you then just switch the channel.

On the other hand when I go to tiktok I get thrown into a random content at every finger flick and I'm delighted because that's exactly why I went there.

If Netflix had well personalized mini tiktok mode serving interesting scenes from the movies you can watch there it could do wonderfully.

Interesting movie scenes is entire genre of tiktok videos. Another movie related genre is narrated summaries of weird movies. This requires bit of work to prepare but still could do well.

Decision fatigue, nostalgia, attenuation — call it what you will. At some level we're tacitly acknowledging that the vast ocean of content and complexity we've created is beyond what is desirable or even healthy to effectively evaluate.

A very modern malaise. Excuse the armchair philosophizing.

I don't think there's enough useful and organized information to evaluate. There's no reason for everyone to be stuck in a vast ocean of content labeled with a handful of vague categories, except that that's just the way that someone decided to make it.

If I want to figure out if I want to try a game, I can go to steam and watch a trailer, look at the tags, and still have no idea if the game is worth playing. How do I make a decision?

If I just watch 3 minutes of a lets play, or a live stream, I can get an idea of what the game is like. This youtube channels thing is giving us exactly that experience.

Opening a youtube video directly, on the other hand, is an entire ordeal. It's slow to load, takes up a bunch of ram, puts the video in your history and messes up the minigame of trying to micromanage the algorithm so you don't end up with bad recommendations. It's hard to just simply watch a few seconds of a bunch of videos to get a vibe.

There's so much low hanging fruit in terms of content organization/discovery, it drives me insane that the experience is generally so bad, and getting worse.

Clay Shirky gave a talk on this years ago (also I think it's a blog post) called "It's not information overload, it's filter failure". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI

`wget -r -np -k https://ytch.xyz` - downloads the website recursively

`wget https://ytch.xyz/list.json` - download the list of what every channel plays and will play (I'm not sure if this ever really changes. The real website adds ?t=)

Then for instance run `python3 -m http.server` and visit localhost:8000

:)

I'm curious, do you generate that list on-the-fly, based on the current time/day? Or is it more static?

If I was allowed to dream, I imagine a world where that specialization is brought back. People curating a feed, which was on average good.

This makes me assume that it’s hand-made. If so, it’ll probably get 1 or 2 updates (if even that many) and then remain static as the creator loses interest. Wouldn’t be the first time.

EDIT: list has changed. Trying to track it, we'll see what happens. I really hope the author has some way to search Youtube for trending videos based on some query/tag, and re-generates a list once a day or something like that.

Well, this website is completely cloneable, the JS is non-minified, so adding in community lists is certainly possible. Maybe just a tool to create those lists collaboratively. Good idea!

If this could be made into a firestick app or something and come with a recommendation system, allow some customization using topics instead of channel names and have them be editable and customized to different youtube interests - I would buy it

It's the delivery and the format that I'm nostalgic for, it doesn't need to be the vintage material. It would be cool to have some modern School House Rock and PSA and mini-craft projects.

Grab a big bowl, a box of cereal, and a carton of milk and just veg out in your pajamas on the couch on a weekend morning.

Since the author is reading here, one feature request: Please put a volume slider on it and also make a mouse wheel scroll on any part of the page change the volume.

I think it's the lack of timeshift which triggers me so much, since it's a somewhat standard feature on TVs. No way to pause makes me a bit anxious. I have a bad habit of nesting YT videos, where I pause one, watch another, pause that one, watch another, when it finishes I go back to the previously paused one and so on until I end up watching the first video to the end.

Theoretically you could add a per-client timeshift feature.

I really like the no pausing / everyone being in sync aspect, it's maybe the best feature

2, They may not have anything better to select from. Quickly start/stop the ads a few times and it will usually (but not always) give up on showing any ad at all, which suggests to me that the available ad pool at that point in time is being exhausted.

We don't talk enough about how streaming has forced us into a much worse experience with ads that are unskippable, privacy-invading, and now I hear they're being dynamically inserted into programming mid-scene.

At some points topics become stale.

I haven't watched TV in years and years and years, because of the ads. I have a YouTube premium subscription and I am not ever going to watch broadcast or cable tv again. ever.

I don’t ever want to see a commercial. I have never been influenced by one. I never will be unless they change dramatically. There is no sales pitch that does not immediately make me dislike the salesperson.

“You don’t deserve your money as much as I do.” That’s all a commercial is. “We want your money so here is some quick audio and maybe video designed to convince you to give your money to us, in exchange for something less valuable than the amount you paid.”

My vision went beyond this into allowing users to create their own channels (still only identifiable by a channel number) which would basically just be a playlist. I think a better idea now would be to have them add a list of channels and have it randomly play videos from only those channels and have that interrupted by anytime that channel is live streaming.

As a programmer with UI experience (for both physical and graphical UIs) I am aware that nothing stops us from deploying similar paradigms in the digital domain and this is yet another example to make the point, that it is possible.

Sadly few companies nowadays have any incentive to make their interfaces so neutral, egalitarian and simple. It seems to take a special kind of radicalism to commit to limited controls and not slap open ended navigational structures, menus and so on onto a touchscreen. Car interfaces come to my mind.

This has a super smooth feel and throws you directly in, really well done.

Then I tried it. It's awesome. I can't tell you why, but there's something about it that, I guess, has been programmed into my brain over decades.

Great work.

* It's missing the part where you get your little sister to hold the antenna in a certain position so you can get a clear picture.

1. Cable is expensive, pretty much majority of streamming services bumped up their $$$, if you add 3-4 of them, the cost will be the same as cable.

2. When i used this, cant lie. I missed the nostalgia.

I was looking for exactly this to control my (and my kid's) TV habbits. My TV is only for YouTube. Everything we like watching is on Youtube.

But with remote in hand, it NEVER STOPS. We (and my kid) keep jumping from one video to another. When I watched TV as a kid, I only had to be in-front of TV on a schedule. I would be doing something else in other times.

THIS is the YouTube TV that I need.

I love it when I unexpectedly encounter something that turns on the nostalgia in such a deep way. Awesome project.

Do I love it because of the nostalgia, or is there something novel here worth exploring further?

My project was never used (except me and just my family) nor resurfaced on forums etc. but our choice of the same favicon touched me :)

My concern for such a project was that I found using the content that others created without attributing the og creator a bit sketchy.

P.S: It seems I leaked my app 10 months ago under another thread -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37905024

Definitely a lot more usable from a browser for sure. I'd echo other comments that a TV guide style interface would be a fantastic addition that would take this from a "that's cool" to something I'd potentially regularly use.