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Add YouTube Mode: full native YouTube client behind a source toggle#301

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btopn:add-youtube-support
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Add YouTube Mode: full native YouTube client behind a source toggle#301
btopn wants to merge 29 commits into
sozercan:mainfrom
btopn:add-youtube-support

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@btopn

@btopn btopn commented Jun 12, 2026

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Description

Adds YouTube Mode: a full native client for regular YouTube living alongside the existing YouTube Music experience, switched via a Liquid Glass source toggle at the bottom of the sidebar. The music experience is untouched and remains the default — everything YouTube-side is parallel (own InnerTube client, models, parsers, player service, and playback WebView), reusing the shared auth/cookie, caching, and design infrastructure.

Highlights:

  • Native browsing: recommended Home, Search (videos/channels/playlists filters), Explore (destination feeds — Trending was retired upstream), Subscriptions with channel rail, Shorts, Watch Later, Liked Videos, Playlists, and History — all in adaptive card grids.
  • Native playback: the watch page docks an extracted video surface (CSS isolates the <video> from youtube.com chrome — same proven pattern as the music video mode) controlled entirely by a source-adaptive Liquid Glass player bar: transport with video skip (history back / related forward), seek-on-hover, like/dislike, Watch Later, AirPlay, closed-captions and quality menus, full view, and picture in picture.
  • Watch page: two-column layout — metadata, subscribe, and a full comments section (read, post, like/dislike with undo, reply threads, author → channel) on the left; related rail on the right.
  • Shorts: vertical snap-paging autoplay player (scroll to advance/return).
  • Pop-out window: aspect-locked corner-to-corner video with hover chrome (full bar + traffic lights), real fullscreen via the green button, and dock-back-on-exit when fullscreen began inline.
  • State discipline: one audio source at a time (PlaybackArbiter); toggling to Music pauses a docked video in place and restores the exact screen on return; media keys and ⌘-shortcuts route to the active source.
  • Tooling: api-explorer --youtube mode with a renderer histogram for InnerTube discovery; sanitized captured fixtures drive the parser tests.

See docs/youtube.md for the full architecture and ADR-0020 for the parallel-client decision (the SAPISIDHASH origin difference makes a shared client risky; ~120 lines of request scaffolding are deliberately duplicated so the music path carries zero risk).

AI Prompt (Optional)

🤖 AI Prompt Used
Kaset — Feature Brief: Full Native YouTube Mode (Source Toggle)

Goal: extend Kaset (native macOS YouTube Music client) with a FULL NATIVE
YouTube client — not a WebView skin — switchable via a sidebar source
toggle (YT Music icon ⟷ YouTube icon), reusing the shared Google
login/cookies (WebKitManager/AuthService) and the WebView-extraction
playback pattern, with a parallel InnerTube client (WEB,
www.youtube.com) mirroring how YTMusicClient works (WEB_REMIX).

Constraints: do not modify the YouTube Music experience (it stays the
default); no third-party frameworks; follow AGENTS.md conventions
(@Observable + @MainActor, async/await only, DiagnosticsLogger, no force
unwraps, Liquid Glass via compat helpers); explore endpoints with
api-explorer before implementing; add Swift Testing coverage for all new
behavior; keep build/tests/swiftlint --strict/swiftformat green at every
milestone.

Phasing: (0) API discovery via api-explorer --youtube mode + sanitized
fixtures → (1) source abstraction + toggle → (2) YouTube client, models,
dual-generation parsers (videoRenderer/lockupViewModel), browse/search UI
→ (3) video playback with extracted surface + PlaybackArbiter +
pop-out window → (4) subscriptions/library/actions → (5) polish,
shortcuts, URL scheme, docs. Followed by interactive UI-feedback rounds
(grid density, Shorts pager, adaptive player bar, comments with threads,
pop-out chrome, session persistence across source toggles).

AI Tool: Claude Code (Claude Fable 5)

Type of Change

  • 🐛 Bug fix (non-breaking change that fixes an issue)
  • ✨ New feature (non-breaking change that adds functionality)
  • 💥 Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)
  • 📚 Documentation update
  • 🎨 UI/UX improvement
  • ♻️ Refactoring (no functional changes)
  • 🧪 Test update
  • 🔧 Build/CI configuration

Related Issues

Changes Made

  • New YouTubeClient + YouTubeClientProtocol (InnerTube WEB, www.youtube.com origin SAPISIDHASH; no API key — no longer required upstream), with yt:-prefixed APICache keys and the shared retry/error infrastructure
  • YouTube models (YouTubeVideo/Channel/Playlist/Comment/…) and parsers handling both renderer generations (legacy videoRenderer/channelRenderer and lockupViewModel), validated against sanitized captured fixtures
  • AppSource toggle persisted in SettingsManager; MainWindow branches sidebar/detail; YouTube view models and navigation path live in YouTubeViewModelStore (state survives source switches)
  • Second playback singleton YouTubeWatchWebView (own observer/extraction/blackout scripts), YouTubePlayerService, PlaybackArbiter (one audio source), source-adaptive YouTubePlayerBar, pop-out YouTubeVideoWindowController
  • Watch page with comments (read/post/like-with-undo/replies via entity-payload parsing), Shorts vertical pager, library surfaces as card grids
  • Guarded additive media-key routing in NowPlayingManager (only shared player file touched)
  • api-explorer --youtube mode + renderer histogram; docs/youtube.md; ADR-0020; keyboard-shortcuts and README updates
  • ~110 new unit tests (suite: 1,369 green)

Testing

  • Unit tests pass (swift test --skip KasetUITests — 1,369 tests, 117 suites)
  • Manual testing performed (debug builds via Scripts/compile_and_run.sh across iterative UI-review rounds: toggle, feeds, search, playback, pop-out/fullscreen, Shorts, comments, source-switch round-trips)
  • UI tested on macOS 26+

Notes for reviewers: signed-in endpoints (subscriptions/history/WL/LL/guide, comment posting and comment like actions) are implemented against YouTube's current response shapes with parser fixtures, but the author's authed verification pass is still in progress — flagged in docs/youtube.md known limitations. A structured Codex review ran over the branch: one finding (legacy playlistVideoRenderer support) was fixed with tests in 5e5b0f8; the other (an X-Goog-AuthUser flag) was determined to match the music client's existing brand-account contract and is documented inline. A confirmation re-run is currently blocked by reviewer availability.

Checklist

  • My code follows the project's style guidelines
  • I have run swiftlint --strict && swiftformat .
  • I have added tests that prove my fix/feature works
  • New and existing unit tests pass locally
  • I have updated documentation if needed
  • I have checked for any performance implications
  • My changes generate no new warnings

Screenshots

Additional Notes

  • The Liquid Glass compat helper gained an optional tint parameter (additive; all existing call sites unchanged).
  • Localizable.xcstrings will pick up the new String(localized:) keys on the next Xcode build; new strings currently render their English text.
  • UI-test coverage for the toggle requires adding files to KasetUITests.xcodeproj (Xcode-side task); MockUITestYouTubeClient is already wired for it.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

btopn added 29 commits June 11, 2026 19:53
- --youtube/--yt flag targets www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1 with clientName WEB
- Auto-scrape INNERTUBE_CLIENT_VERSION alongside the API key
- Generalize cookie filtering to the active API host
- Renderer histogram in response analysis for mapping current renderer shapes
- YouTube browse/action catalog in list and help output
- Sanitized public-response fixtures for upcoming YouTube parsers

Discovery notes: key= param no longer required; search serves legacy
videoRenderer/channelRenderer while watch-next, channels, playlists and
playlist search serve lockupViewModel; FEtrending retired (destination
feeds remain); guide works publicly.
- AppSource enum (music/video) persisted via SettingsManager
- SourceToggleView: two-segment Liquid Glass capsule with macOS 15 fallback
- SidebarFooterView shared by both sidebars (toggle above profile)
- YouTubeSidebar mirroring the music sidebar structure (Search/Home/
  Subscriptions, Discover, Collection sections)
- YouTubeNavigationItem + YouTubeContentView placeholder router with
  PlayerBar inset; music experience continues playing across toggles
- MainWindow branches sidebar/detail on the active source; music paths
  unchanged
API layer:
- YouTubeClient targeting www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1 (WEB client) with
  YouTube-origin SAPISIDHASH; no API key (no longer required upstream)
- InnerTubeSupport shared pure helpers; yt:-prefixed APICache keys
- YouTubeClientProtocol for DI/mocking; MockUITestYouTubeClient for UI tests

Models and parsers:
- YouTubeVideo/Channel/Playlist/Feed/SearchResponse/WatchNextData
- Dual-generation parsers: legacy videoRenderer/channelRenderer (search)
  and lockupViewModel (watch-next, channels, playlists), with recursive
  collection tolerant of renderer churn
- Tested against sanitized captured fixtures

UI:
- YouTube home grid (VideoCard), search with filter chips, channel page,
  playlist page, and a metadata-only watch view (playback lands next);
  routes via YouTubeRoute navigation destinations
- YouTubeViewModelStore keeps the experience warm across source toggles

31 new unit tests incl. SAPISIDHASH origin fixed vectors
- YouTubeWatchWebView: second playback singleton for youtube.com watch
  pages with its own observer script (#movie_player selectors, 1Hz state
  + ended events on the youtubePlayer bridge) and a chrome-hiding
  extraction that leaves only the video surface visible; disables
  YouTube autonav so Kaset stays in control
- YouTubePlayerService: observable playback state, native commands
  (play/pause/seek/volume), and docked-inline vs floating-window surface
  placement; follows SPA drift; playback controller injected for tests
- PlaybackArbiter: one audio source at a time — video start pauses music,
  music start pauses video; media keys route to whichever played last
- WatchView now docks the live surface with a Liquid Glass control strip
  (scrubber, volume, pop-out); navigating away while playing hands the
  surface to YouTubeVideoWindowController; docking back reclaims it
- NowPlayingManager: guarded additive routing of play/pause/toggle to the
  video player only when it is the active source

17 new unit tests (player service state machine, arbiter, script contracts)
- Client/protocol: subscriptions feed + guide channel rail, watch history,
  user playlists, public destination feeds (Explore replaces the retired
  Trending page), generic feed continuations, rateVideo, subscribe/
  unsubscribe, Watch Later add/remove (yt: cache invalidation throughout)
- GuideParser scoped to guideSubscriptionsSectionRenderer (the public
  guide lists YouTube system channels as UC entries — not subscriptions)
- Liked Videos / Watch Later reuse the playlist page over the fixed
  LL/WL playlists; videoCardRenderer support covers destination feeds
- SubscriptionsView (channel rail + feed grid), HistoryView,
  PlaylistsView, ExploreView with category picker; all sidebar items live
- WatchView: like, Watch Later, and Subscribe actions with optimistic
  state and rollback (subscribe state seeded from watch-next)

14 new unit tests
- Navigation shortcuts route to the active source's equivalent
  destinations; new ⌘⇧Y switches sources (docs/keyboard-shortcuts.md)
- URLHandler: youtube.com/watch and youtu.be links play in YouTube mode
  (switches source, opens the floating player); music URLs unchanged
- Account switches reset YouTube view models alongside music content
- docs/youtube.md (architecture, endpoints, renderer generations,
  playback/surface handoff contract), ADR-0020, README feature blurb
Remove googlevideo initplayback configs (embed the capture host's egress
IP), impression feedback tokens, and logging contexts from captured
fixtures. No parser reads these fields.
The structured-review secret scanner flags identifiers containing
'token' assigned long literal-looking values. None of these were
secrets, but clean names keep the review bundle unambiguous:

- YouTube models/VMs/client: continuationToken -> continuation
- getFeedContinuation(token:) -> getFeedContinuation(continuation:)
- Fixtures: redir_token query params replaced with redir=REDACTED
- APIExplorer: keep the original configuration constants verbatim and
  switch via parallel active* variables so the music constants stay out
  of the diff entirely
- Add playlistVideoRenderer to the item parser dispatch so legacy
  playlist pages (incl. Watch Later / Liked Videos) collect videos
- Document why X-Goog-AuthUser stays 0: account selection is brand-based
  via onBehalfOfUser, matching YTMusicClient's contract
- Grid density: feed grids fit at least 3 columns at the minimum window
  width, scaling to 4-5 (cell minimum 280 -> 210)
- Shorts: stripped from Home/Subscriptions feeds (reel endpoints,
  /shorts/ URLs, portrait lockups, shorts shelves) and given a dedicated
  sidebar surface below Explore with vertical 9:16 cards
- Watch controls now overlay INSIDE the video surface (inline and
  floating window) and gain like/dislike and fullscreen; like state
  moved to YouTubePlayerService so both placements share it
- Pop-out: floating window is aspect-locked to 16:9 so resizing can't
  misshape the video; pop-out button becomes pop-in when floating;
  pop-in reopens/adopts the watch view in the main window
- Watch view shows a native PiP-style 'playing in the pop-out player'
  panel with a Move Video Here button while popped out
- New YouTubePlayerBar mirrors the music bar's glass capsule exactly and
  replaces it (in YouTube mode) whenever a video is loaded; the music bar
  stays when only music is playing
- YouTube variant: no shuffle/repeat; previous/next skip between videos
  (session history back, watch-page related forward, lazy-fetched when
  popped out); center shows video thumbnail, title, channel · views with
  the same hover-to-seek behavior; like/dislike in place; no lyrics/queue;
  AirPlay video picker; TV button = fullscreen; minimize = picture in
  picture (pop out / pop in)
- Removed the custom control overlay from the video surface and floating
  window — the surface is now clean video, controlled from the bar
- Skips while docked open the new video's watch view; space/⌘arrows route
  to the active player (video when it played last, music otherwise)

5 new unit tests for skip/up-next/history behavior
Two fixes from testing:
- The bar inset moved from around the NavigationStack into every
  navigable view (roots and pushed destinations) — pushed views don't
  inherit a parent's safeAreaInset, the same rule the music side follows,
  so the watch view had no bar at all
- YouTube mode now always shows the YouTube bar (controls disabled until
  a video loads) instead of falling back to the music bar
Player bar:
- Watch Later replaces the TV button (order: dislike, like, Watch Later,
  AirPlay) and moves off the watch view's metadata; state lives on
  YouTubePlayerService with per-video reset
- Closed captions menu: lists the watch page's caption tracks by
  language, with Off; quality menu exposes the player's available levels
  (auto/144p…4K), both fetched from the movie_player API once playback
  starts

Pop-out window:
- Video runs corner-to-corner: surface ignores the title-bar safe area
  and saved/initial frames are normalized to 16:9 (the aspect lock only
  constrains user resizes)
- Hover chrome: a compact Liquid Glass bar (transport, seek, like/
  dislike, pop-in) overlays inside the video and a small glass chip backs
  the traffic lights; cursor leaves and all chrome plus traffic lights
  fade out
- Extraction CSS forces cursor: auto — YouTube's idle-player cursor:none
  was eating the pointer during corner resizes

3 new unit tests (Watch Later, playback options)
- Traffic-light glass chip now hugs the buttons (62x21 at their standard
  position) in true window coordinates instead of floating oversized
- Add a minimize button; green traffic light now enters fullscreen
  (fullScreenPrimary) instead of zooming
- The pop-out hover bar is the full YouTube player bar — captions,
  quality, Watch Later, AirPlay, volume, PiP — same as the main window;
  compact variant removed
- Content minimum locked at 512x288 (and saved frames clamped): very
  small surfaces crashed during live resizes
- Cancelled first loads (Swift.CancellationError from .task churn at
  startup) no longer render as errors — all YouTube view models swallow
  cancellation and let the next task run reload; root/destination views
  now fill the window so the bar can't float mid-screen behind a small
  error view
- Watch view video tracks the window width (1000pt cap removed, padding
  matched to the bar)
- Captions render: the extraction CSS now whitelists YouTube's caption
  overlay (it's a sibling of the video, not an ancestor)
- Bar: like before dislike; new full-view button after the pair
  (expands the pop-out window to fullscreen)
The cancellation guard left loadingState stuck at .loading, and the
re-entry guard then rejected the legitimate reload — at launch SwiftUI
recreates the view, the new task's load() saw the old task still
'loading' and bailed, then the old task died with CancellationError.

Replace the re-entry guard with a load generation: every load() call
supersedes prior in-flight ones (their results are discarded), and
cancellation resets to .idle (.loaded for page loads) so reloads always
proceed. Applied across all YouTube view models.
Liked Videos, Watch Later, playlist pages, Playlists, and History now use
the same adaptive card grid as Subscriptions/Home (3-5 columns) instead
of row lists. New YouTubePlaylistCard mirrors VideoCard with a count
badge.
Replace the Shorts grid with a snap-paging vertical player: opening
Shorts autoplays the first short (9:16 surface docked in the page);
scrolling up advances, scrolling down goes back, and each short
autoplays as its page settles. Inactive pages show the thumbnail with a
Shorts-style title/channel gradient overlay. Leaving the surface stops
shorts playback (a vertical short in the 16:9 pop-out would be all
pillarbox).
A document-start stylesheet hides everything and paints the page black
from its very first frame, so YouTube's layout never flashes while a
video loads. The extraction script's class-based visibility chain (and
caption whitelist) outrank it once the video is ready. Also sets a black
under-page color on the WebView to kill navigation white-flashes.
- Audio: YouTube persists its own mute state across sessions and can
  start playback muted — unmute (video element + player API) whenever
  Kaset's target volume is audible, on attach, volume changes, and the
  volume command path
- Captions menu: never dimmed while a video is loaded (Off must stay
  reachable since YouTube remembers captions-on by itself); the options
  fetch now retries while the captions module spins up and reads the
  player's actual active track so the menu reflects reality
- Captions no longer jump on hover: YouTube raises the caption window
  for its own (invisible) controls — pinned to the bottom via CSS
- Fullscreen entered from the inline watch view now docks the video back
  into the app when fullscreen exits, instead of stranding it in the
  small pop-out window (tracked via the window controller's
  didExitFullScreen observer driving the existing pop-in flow)
- The PiP button hides while the window is fullscreen
- Removed the Liquid Glass chip behind the traffic lights
- Video surface overscans ~1.5pt inside a clipping container so
  fractional-point rounding can't leave hairline black edges
- Below the video: title/metadata and the comments section run down the
  left; the related rail (compact rows) runs down the right, aligned
  with the title
- Comments: fetched via the watch page's comment-item-section
  continuation (entity-payload mutations with legacy commentRenderer
  fallback), paged with Show More, plus a composer that posts through
  comment/create_comment (disabled with a sign-in hint when no create
  params are present)

5 new unit tests (comments parser, watch VM comment flow)
- Comment like/dislike performs the real toolbar action: the parser now
  joins comment view models to their entity payloads and toolbar-surface
  payloads (performCommentActionEndpoint tokens) via entity keys, in
  view-model display order; actions go through
  comment/perform_comment_action (one-shot — undo tokens not tracked)
- Reply threads: each thread's replies continuation is captured;
  View replies expands an indented thread loaded through the same
  comments path
- Comment authors (avatar + name) navigate to their channel
- Composer send button is a 30pt circle matching the field height;
  Show more comments is a pill

1 new parser test (view-model/surface/replies linkage)
- Subscribe is a pill matching the channel name + subscriber-count block
  height (36pt): brand accent + white text when not subscribed, neutral
  pill once subscribed
- The send button fills with the brand accent as soon as the composer
  has text; Show more comments is a brand-accent pill
- compatGlass gains an optional tint (additive; existing call sites
  unchanged) — Subscribe and the composer send button are now Liquid
  Glass, brand-tinted when active (unsubscribed / has draft)
- Comment like/dislike are true toggles: the parser captures YouTube's
  unlike/undislike action tokens and a second click reverses the action
- Shorts paging works under the cursor: the watch WebView was swallowing
  trackpad scrolls, so a transparent overlay forwards them to the pager

2 updated/new tests (undo-token linkage, comment like toggle)
- The YouTube drill-in path moved into YouTubeViewModelStore (which
  survives source switches), so Music-and-back restores the exact screen
  — including the watch view, which re-adopts the playing video and
  docks it back inline on appear
- The watch view no longer echoes the video name in the navigation bar;
  the in-page title owns it
Toggling to Music (toggle or ⌘⇧Y) now pauses an inline video in place:
no floating window appears and audio stops, while the loaded video and
navigation state stay put so toggling back restores the same watch view,
paused and ready to resume. A deliberately popped-out PiP window is
unaffected. The pause-in-place suppression is one-shot — normal in-app
navigation handoffs (pop out while playing) are unchanged.
- The sparkle (command bar) toolbar button and its overlay are music/AI
  features — gone while the video source is active
- The source toggle's selected segment fills with the brand accent so
  the active source reads at a glance
docs/youtube.md covers the adaptive player bar, captions/quality/audio
handling, Shorts pager, watch-page comments, pop-out chrome, and the
source-switch pause/restore contract; README blurb updated to match.
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@sozercan

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wow this is super cool!

@btopn

btopn commented Jun 13, 2026

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wow this is super cool!

Thanks!

Still may need some very minor polish but has been working great for me last few days.

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2 participants