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Manila Bulletin devider Technews devider Let's Play

Let's Play

Published Feb 11, 2022 06:27 am

A few days ago, I discovered another iOS, iPadOS and MacOS gem - (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/play-save-videos-watch-later/id1596506190), an application to save your YouTube video URLs in. It is a convenient way to manage your YouTube video library without logging on YouTube and giving more data points to Google. Play allows you to organize your video collection using tags, and with iCloud sync support, this gets propagated to all devices. Note that Play does not download the videos, it organizes the URLs of your favorite YouTube videos.

YouTube is one of the Alphabet products that I couldn't find a replacement or alternative to. It is not about replacing the technology, but replacing the content - if only the content on YouTube is available on (https://joinpeertube.org). Anyway, to access YouTube videos without giving too much data to Alphabet, I use (https://yewtu.be) when I want to watch it right away, but otherwise, I'd download it using (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) or (https://youtube-dl.org) for later viewing on the Apple TV via Plex. And to make it simpler, I wrote three different shortcuts to automate my workflow: send the YouTube URL to my Raspberry Pi for downloading, Add YouTube URL to Reminders app for later downloading (usually when I am away from my home network) and Process each YouTube URL in the Reminders app and call the first shortcut to download it (when I am on my home network). Why Reminders app? Well, at that time, it is the best way to write, read and delete items using shortcuts that is available on iOS, iPadOS and MacOS.

With Play, I have simplified my shortcuts from three to two. The shortcut that connects to my Raspberry Pi to download the YouTube video remains intact, i.e., no changes. The shortcut that adds the URLs to the Reminders app got cut. Play provides this with its built-in ShareSheet function, "Add To Play". Finally, the shortcut that processes the list of URLs was modified to access the Play library instead of the Reminders app, yes, Play has Shortcuts support, too! Awesome, right?

I thank Marcos Tanaka for making this application and for quickly responding to queries on Twitter. I found a ShareSheet bug when using DuckDuckGo browser, and also Yewtu.be links are not being recognized, and I hope they get resolved soon.

Play is available on the iOS App Store and Mac App Store for PhP99.00/US$1.99, and you can share it via Family Sharing, too! So what are you waiting for?

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