VOGONS


First post, by keenmaster486

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The title says it all -- this is a project to try to make YouTube work on retro computers.

It's geared towards 32-bit Windows on Pentium/MMX and up, PII or PIII recommended.

Basically, on your host server, it spawns a VLC process to transcode the YouTube video to a simple MPEG-1 format.

Right now it is very simple in that it only works for ONE client at a time. If you start a new video it destroys the old VLC process and starts a new one.

At some point I will change it so it will work for multiple clients at once, but it's only in the testing stages right now.

Clone the GitHub repo and try it out! https://github.com/keenmaster486/retro-video-server

Some screenshots:

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World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 2 of 13, by Bruninho

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That's one amazing piece of art! Good work!

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 3 of 13, by JonathonWyble

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README.md wrote:

Requirements
A computer running Linux (Windows and Mac not tested but might work fine)

If this tool best works on Linux, then how come in the screenshots, it shows a laptop running Windows? (I can tell by looking at the 9x-like taskbar.)

Other than that, nice tool 😀

1998 Pentium II build

1553292341.th.19547.gif

Reply 4 of 13, by keenmaster486

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JonathonWyble wrote:

If this tool best works on Linux, then how come in the screenshots, it shows a laptop running Windows? (I can tell by looking at the 9x-like taskbar.)

The server runs on Linux. The client should be Windows.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 6 of 13, by Bruninho

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keenmaster486 wrote on 2021-07-14, 17:44:

Should I resurrect this project?

Definitely. Talk to Action Retro or some guys over PowerPC forums (MacRumors) about it, they have been working on something similar for macOS 9, maybe both can exchange some information...

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 7 of 13, by keenmaster486

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Bruninho wrote on 2021-07-16, 04:36:

Definitely. Talk to Action Retro or some guys over PowerPC forums (MacRumors) about it, they have been working on something similar for macOS 9, maybe both can exchange some information...

Really? Maybe I will then. Thanks!

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 8 of 13, by Bruninho

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keenmaster486 wrote on 2021-07-16, 14:32:
Bruninho wrote on 2021-07-16, 04:36:

Definitely. Talk to Action Retro or some guys over PowerPC forums (MacRumors) about it, they have been working on something similar for macOS 9, maybe both can exchange some information...

Really? Maybe I will then. Thanks!

I *think* all these guys are there: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/6-2-2021 … 5-macs.2224743/

Dronecatcher and alex_free are probably the guys you're looking for.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 9 of 13, by WedgeStratos

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A universal solution would be fantastic, to cover both Mac and Windows. I wouldn't mind the freedom to play videos back either in WMP, VLC, QuickTime, RealPlayer, etc.
I just attempted to test this myself, and ran into this heap after a search. Given it's been 2 years, I'm not surprised something's gone wrong with the scripts. I presume you still use the Youtube Data API (and not the Youtube Live API).

With that said, the hard-coded script works fine, video transcoding and all. Great work!

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Reply 10 of 13, by BitWrangler

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Youtube changed something in the API early this year which broke youtube app on Gen 2 Apple TV and a load of older smart TVs. So might be the same thing.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 11 of 13, by keenmaster486

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Oh dang, it has been quite some time since I looked at this.

I should fire it up again and see if the structure of the data the YouTube API returns has changed. It probably has, that may be your issue. Try console logging the actual data returned to see if the "items" object still exists in there.

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 12 of 13, by WedgeStratos

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I would actually suggest exploring a solution ala NewPipe on Android. Their trick to bypass the need for the API key entirely is to simply query the Youtube search page, and extract the results.
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/

NewPipe Extractor is a library for extracting things from streaming sites. It is a core component of NewPipe, but could be used independently.

Not sure if this has any negatives right now, like certain search results being age-gated, but for the average user of this kind of quirky video playback, I doubt that's a massive issue.

While I would do that, the terminal unfortunately gives... the exact same information as was sent to the browser. Unless there's a way to open server.js with debugging that I'm unaware of.

Also, now RetroZilla's having a fit over Winamp. I don't know why, but now I can't get it to open the stream in VLC within the browser.

Reply 13 of 13, by ibm5155

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Cool project!

I gave it a try and I'm doing some fine-tuning on it for a Pentium MMX and so far it's playing videos smoothly.
So far my only issue was that things get glitchy over time if you try to open a live stream from youtube (VLC starts to create new channels for some reason)

I also tried to play with the MMS protocol but so far no luck, it's way too slow for both old and even new machines :C (plus doesn't work with WMP6.4 and 7)