Hi HN!
I created BackTrack, a standalone web app for your YouTube video library.<p>Why it exists?
I made this project because I was looking for an offline YouTube video library solution with background playback. I have looked at TubeArchivist, but it requires me running my own server. In addition, I also looked at apps like NewPipe, but it is only available for Android, while I am using iOS.<p>How it works?
For adding videos, it can be either from pasting a YouTube link, or directly search from the web app, the search result is scraped from DuckDuckGo.<p>For retrieving the video metadata or downloading video, it calls YouTube API for a specific android app version, which doesn’t encrypt the video URL. I think they still have this for backward compatibility, as the newer version API will return the video URL with signature/token.<p>And in order to bypass the CORS restriction for both DDG and YT, I am using a CORS proxy.<p>For storage, it uses IndexedDB, which supports storing binaries.<p>For background playback and media controls, it uses plain old audio tag and Media Session API.<p>Hope you enjoy and find it useful.