At the moment, I haven't integrate Youlag with FreshRSS as a full fledge extension, but once that is in place, it would be possible to store user preferences. While it requires time and effort, I believe it shouldn't be too hard to implment this feature.
Sorry about that, I've included the fix in the latest release, and instructions on how to bypass the loading screen in the release notes:
https://github.com/civilblur/youlag/releases/tag/v3.0.4
Here in an excerpt from the release note:
In case FreshRSS got stuck in a loading state with the
v3.0.2release:You can manually bypass the loading state by opening the inspect mode on your browser. Within the "Elements" tab, locate the
bodyelement and add the CSS classyoulag-loaded.Example:
- From
<body class="normal">- To
<body class="normal youlag-loaded">.The adjustment above will exit the loading state, allowing you to interact with the content and access the extension page.
For your convenience, below is the url path to the "User CSS" extension page:
https://yourfreshrssdomain.com/i/?c=extension&a=configure&e=User%2BCSSHead to this page and replace the old CSS with the one provided in this release.
Edit: Fixed typo on CSS class name
Since I don't use a TV myself, I have not looked into this scenario unfortunately.
Browse and watch videos in FreshRSS like it's YouTube: "Youlag theme/extension" (v3.0.2)
"Youlag" is a theme and extension for the feed aggregator FreshRSS. It delivers a video-focused browsing experience for your YouTube RSS feeds, all within FreshRSS, with a sleek theme and extra features.
Supports video feeds from YouTube, Invidious, and Piped.
Why?
The general idea is to subscribe to YouTube channels via RSS, allowing you to follow your favorite creators without an account. With Youlag installed, you can browse and watch videos in a familiar, YouTube-like interface.
More features are planned, including video queuing (with some limitations).
Git repository for more details:
https://github.com/civilblur/youlag
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Features:
- ⭐ Optimized for Video Viewing
- Browse your YouTube, Invidious, Piped RSS subscriptions with ease.
- Clean, familiar video platform layout.
- Fullscreen viewing for videos and feed items.
- Quickly exit videos with
Esckey. - Shortcuts for external viewing: "Invidious", "YouTube", or "YouTube embed view" (for less distraction).
- Dark mode.
- 🖥️ Desktop & Mobile
- Reponsive design.
- Redesigned menus for better one-handed navigation.
- Improved readability and legibility across devices.
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Since v3.0.0, and currently v3.0.2, Youlag has been refactored from a CSS theme to work more like an extension. This has improved stability and allowed me to add more features.
It's still not yet a native FreshRSS extension, but my plan is to convert it to one.
Edit 2025-02-23:
Please use the latest release, which is v3.0.4 as of writing.
No worries! This setup ended up working better than I thought, and I've been using it as my primary way of interfacing with youtube.
Addressing the subscribing part; I had similar requirements, so I started subscribing via FreshRSS while using a custom theme to give it a YouTube-like experience.
I shared the setup a few month ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21381606
Edit: One of the benefits of using selfhosted RSS with a web interface is that it is platform agnostic.
Looking forward to it, feel free and share it once it's ready, or if you need any feedback.
Hopefully this will spark some interest in that!
I have limited knowledge of what limitations extensions have at the moment, but considering FreshRSS is server side rendered, integrating DeArrow on a deeper level would be ideal (if possible). It would mean that the thumbnail and title you get when you load the page would immediately be the non-clickbait ones, and it would only need to run it once for each video (if cached).
I did however test DeArrow's API and it was very straightforward. However, running it as a client-side script would essentially mean that every video would have to be checked and "DeArrowed" on the fly, and it would do that for every page refresh. That might not be very performant for you, nor DeArrow's free API service.
In short, it should be possible, but not ideal. I'm personally interested in the idea as well, but I'm not sure if I'll have time to tackle this.
It applies the theme across the entire instance!
I believe it could be done however, but it's likely more suitable as an extension, opposed to a "theme" that relies on client-side css/js. I haven't explored the documentations for extensions as I intended this to be a "quick" solution to get a youtube-like experience.
Browse FreshRSS like YouTube: "Youlag Theme for FreshRSS"
"Youlag Theme for FreshRSS" provides a video-focused browsing experience for your RSS subscriptions. It tries to provide a similar experience to YouTube, primarily through its layout using CSS, but also a little bit of Javascript.
Git repo for more details: https://github.com/civilblur/youlag
In case you're not aware, "FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS feed aggregator".
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The idea is that you subscribe to content creators through YouTube's RSS feed https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={id_goes_here}, then browse, watch, save to playlist ("label"), right within FreshRSS.
There's also third-party extension for FreshRSS that provides the ability to use Invidious, but as we all know, the public instances are unfortunately struggling quite a bit as of writing.