Ability to play downloaded videos

[TheDcoder]

• I carefully read the contribution guidelines and agree to them.
• I checked if the issue/feature exists in the latest version.

Hi, I think it would be nice if NewPipe was able to play downloaded videos... much like Youtube's "Save Offline" feature.
People with phones which do not support playback of WebM might find this very useful!

@ssibb in #3932 also suggested the ability to watch the video file while it is being downloaded, in order to be able to judge the quality without wasting data by fetching the video twice (i.e. for viewing and for downloading).

[theScrabi]

Well, but this is a feature you can easily fix yourself by installing a player that can handle webm, or download the videos in mp4 format.

I'd say this is not a top level feature.

[TheDcoder]

@theScrabi Some propitiatory players might be able to do that but in my phone VLC does not work since my phone is a low-end android device 😞. I want to keep it as free as possible. Another reason for not using mp4 is that its not a free format... WebM is. and WebM files are smaller too so less data usage!

I hope you understand me :)

[turboteckel]

Isn't MPEG4 smaller than WebM in most cases on YouTube?

[TheDcoder]

@turboteckel Did not know that. When I produce my videos using Camtasia (it makes mp4) I encode it into WebM which makes the file a lot smaller without decreasing quality!

[kasbah]

Really liking NewPipe but they way this is at the moment confused me. I downloaded videos to be able to play them in background (love that feature!) but guessing from this issue when I then play them in NewPipe it is not actually playing back my downloaded videos, rather it's downloading them again by streaming them?

[theScrabi]

NewPipe it is not actually playing back my downloaded videos, rather it's downloading them again by streaming them?

Yes, if you download them it's supposed to listen to them by the internal music player.

[kasbah]

Ah, in that case it would be good to add a "play in NewPipe" option in the downloads menu.

[theScrabi]

We need to se if that it possible with our player.

[ganguin]

Is this issue on track? It would be nice that newpipe is able to play downloaded content, especially for some newpipe features: play in the background and play in a popup. Or is there a nice an alternative audio/video that can do that?

[TheDcoder]

Still waiting for @theScrabi to confirm the possibility of this happening with the current player in NewPipe

[alayoubiyoun]

Our player of Newpipe i love it, but i want it to play just offline music with that playback(ignore silence+Tempo+Pitch) can you help plz

[opusforlife2]

@theScrabi If Newpipe stores in a database the file path of videos/audios when they are being downloaded, is it not possible for Exoplayer to play them by accessing the same file path?

[brunoais]

I believe that, for now, if I try to view a video that has already been downloaded, the app can prompt the user if the user wants to open the file instead with a video viewer.
I think that is more comfortable to do than to deal with redownloads or thinking you are downloading and can then watch later but you cannot.

In my phone, I only have space for some apps and that's it. Only 16GB doesn't give much margin of error, only 9GB, from which I need 1GB free in order to be able to update the apps

[opusforlife2]

I believe that, for now, if I try to view a video that has already been downloaded, the app can prompt the user if the user wants to open the file instead with a video viewer.

@brunoais That is already the case. Try it.

[litetex]

Thank you all for the feedback and participating in this issue.

After ~3 weeks of waiting for votes in #478 (comment) the poll turned out to be an overwhelmingly "don't do it".

I also - again - looked through the comments since I posted the poll but I didn't find anything that fundamentally changed the situation/statements (and that was not already answered by another dev).

Fun Fact

I "surfed the web" a bit and found an offline player implementation, that was done by a fork:

But the implementation is so simple and lacking a ton of features (e.g. seekbar thumbnail preview, replay-speed, mute button, full screen button etc) that every external/pre-installed player like e.g. VLC is doing the job better.
Things like mentioned in #478 (comment) would never be satisfied by such a simple implementation.

Therefore this issue will be closed as out of scope and we will put a statement onto the website (TeamNewPipe/website#260).

[brunoais]

@litetex Wait what?
I thought the thumbs down was in opposition to the proposal for not doing it!

Declare it out of scope and don't do it.

Do we want to do this?

So, for me, the question was (below is my interpretation):
"Do we want to consider out of scope?
👍 - Agree. Out of scope for this project
😕 - no idea / neutral / abstention
👎 - Disagree, it's in scope for this project
"

Did others also vote with this philosophy?

[triallax]

Probably not the team members, no.

[opusforlife2]

Did others also vote with this philosophy?

The team was already talking about not doing it before we started posting here. So it would be quite weird if the team members suddenly took the opposite stand. xD

[brunoais]

Oh... I see... Thanks for answering

[0Karakurt0]

Well, sad to hear it, but I do understand the reasons.
I came to this issue looking for HDR support, as of right now NewPipe's fork is the only player capable of playing some HDR on my phone. But I don't have a good internet to stream higher resolutions...
It would be awesome if support was added only for downloaded videos, even without file dialog or music player interface, that seems to be the lesser evil, if feature is marked as unsupported and therefore all issues are declined.

[opusforlife2]

@0Karakurt0 Try the player linked here: #478 (comment) (https://github.com/moneytoo/Player#supported-formats says HDR is supported.)

[0Karakurt0]

@opusforlife2 VLC also says that support it, and CxM..? Cx-something is supposedly created exactly for that but it is the only one player that managed to mangle the video beyond recognition.
But thanks, I'll try it out

[opusforlife2]

@0Karakurt0 I recommended this to you specifically because you talked about Newpipe's 'player' working, which is basically Google's Exoplayer. This app is also based on Exoplayer.

[0Karakurt0]

@opusforlife2 thanks, works like a charm and does nothing more, awesome player.
I would love it to also support urls, but it seems to be an old issue.

[woj-tek]

Hi,
late to the party but I was just faced with similar issue. Downloading works just fine, but one of the best features / abilities of NewPipe is track what I already watched and till what point. Yes, there are external players that can play fields and even remember position but this information is lost after a while and if I go back to some video I may not remember if I watched (I use NewPipe as my all YT client with all history)

[Inwerpsel]

It's quite unfortunate to see a perfectly reasonable feature request being closed as "not planned". Just because it's not a priority at some point in time doesn't mean it's not useful or even too much work. You can save a lot of bandwidth this way if you're watching a video over and over for learning.

Since the player already has the ability to save to disk, you could could keep a database with all downloaded video IDs and a path on disk. Then, upon playback, you check if the video is in this database. Then you check if it's still on the filesystem. Finally you load the mp4 from the local file system, instead of over the network.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't seem complicated at all (compared to the downloading which is already there), and would give a lot of value.

[opusforlife2]

See #10542.