Version 0.15.0: Preferences and Channel Playlists

The project has seen quite a bit of activity this past month. Large focus has been on fixing bugs, but there's still quite a few new features I'm happy to announce. There have been 133 commits from 15 contributors this past month.

As a couple miscellaneous changes, a couple nice screenshots have been added to the README, so folks can see more of what the site has to offer without creating an account.

The footer has also been cleaned up quite a bit, and now displays the current version, so it's easier to know what features are available from the current instance.

For Administrators

This past month there has been a minor release - 0.14.1 - which fixes a breaking change made by YouTube for their polymer redesign.

There have been several new features that unfortunately require a database migration. There are migration scripts provided in config/migrate-scripts, and the wiki has instructions for automatically applying them. I'll do my best to keep those changes to a minimum, and expect to see a corresponding script to automatically apply any new changes.

Administrator preferences have been added with #312, which allows administrators to customize their instance. Administrators can change the order of feed menus, change the default homepage, disable open registration, and several other options. There's a short 'how-to' here, and the new options are documented here.

An /api/v1/stats endpoint has been added with #356, which reports the instance version and number of active users. Statistics are disabled by default, and can be enabled in administator preferences. Statistics for the official instance are available here.

For Developers

/api/v1/channels/:ucid now provides an autoGenerated tag, which returns true for topic channels, and larger genre channels generated by YouTube. These channels don't have any videos of their own, so latestVideos will be empty. It is recommended instead to display a list of playlists generated by YouTube.

You can now pull a list of playlists from a channel with /api/v1/channels/playlists/:ucid. Supported options are documented in the wiki. Pagination is handled with a continuation token, which is generated on each call. Of note is that auto-generated channels currently have one page of results, and subsequent calls will be empty.

For quickly pulling the latest 30 videos from a channel, there is now /api/v1/channels/latest/:ucid. It is much faster than a call to /api/v1/channels/:ucid. It will not convert an author name to a valid ucid automatically, and will not return any extra data about a channel.

Preferences

In addition to administrator preferences mentioned above, you can now change your preferences without an account (see #42). I think this is quite an improvement to the usability of the site, and is much friendlier to privacy-conscious folks that don't want to make an account. Preferences will be automatically imported to a newly created account.

Several issues with sorting subscriptions have been fixed, and /manage_subscriptions has been sped up significantly. The subscription feed has also seen a bump in performance. Delayed notifications have unfortunately started becoming a problem now that there are more users on the site. Some new changes are currently being tested which should mostly resolve the issue, so expect to see more in the next release.

Channel Playlists

You can now view available playlists from a channel, and auto-generated channels are no longer empty. You can sort as you would on YouTube, and all the same functionality should be available. I'm quite pleased to finally have it implemented, since it's currently the only data available from the above mentioned auto-generated channels, and makes it much easier to consume music on the site.

There's also more discussion on improving Invidious for streaming music in #304, and adding support for music.youtube.com. I would appreciate any thoughts on how to improve that experience, since it's a very large and useful part of YouTube.

Finances

Donations

Patreon : $42.42
Liberapay : $30.97
Crypto : ~$0.00 (converted from BCH, BTC)
Total : $73.39

Expenses

invidious-load1 (nyc1) : $10.00 (load balancer)
invidious-update1 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (updates feeds)
invidious-node1 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
invidious-node2 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
invidious-node3 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
invidious-node4 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
invidious-db1 (s-4vcpu-8gb) : $40.00 (database)
Total : $75.00

It's been very humbling to see how fast the project has grown, and I look forward to making the site even better. Thank you everyone.