Toby is a simple YouTube player for the desktop.

Toby In Action:

Toby Main UI:

Toby Video List:

Toby Recently Played:

Toby Manage Videos:

Toby Server Log:

The old Toby architecture was geared towards an Electron deployment and I loaded all the code from the file system. The new architecture puts Toby behind an Express web application that is spawned from a regular Node process so that more deployment scenarios are possible.

A Toby deployment would ship the regular Node.exe and Node.dll files along side the source code. We know NW.js and Electron ship with Node embedded but shipping Node as an external resource allows us to run Toby in a regular Node process and unencumbered by NW.js / Electron specific compiling requirements for any potential native Node modules we may want to use in the future. The only native Node module being at the moment is SQLite3.

Having Toby behind an Express app makes it fairly trivial to deploy to NW.js, Electron and support a regular web browser. You need a fairly minimal set of supporting files to bootstrap the app in those environments.

Toby is meant as a personal application running on a personal computer and it's web API is not password protected in any way and there has been no attempt to protect the data Toby collects. Toby only cares about a few things, namely YouTube video titles, YouTube video IDs and the groups you decide to store your favorite videos in.

NW.js, Electron and normal web browser are supported.

NOTE: If you want to run Toby you can just run it from the latest 1.0-RC1 release if you are on Windows. If you aren't on Windows or want to run the latest code you can follow the instructions below.

Set up the folder structure for working with either NW.js or Electron like this:

Toby-Master
  - toby [source code from the rewrite branch]
  - nwjs [http://nwjs.io] (I'm using 0.15 Windows x64)
  - electron [http://electron.atom.io] (I'm using 1.1.3 Windows x64)

Depending on what platform you want to run Toby in (Electron or NW.js) you'll need to make sure the main property in package.json is set accordingly:

NOTE: I'll probably rename this to nwjs.html to make it more obvious.

main: "index.html"

main: "electron.js"

In order to run Toby you'll need to download the dependencies and build the source code, those steps are listed below.

Assuming all dependencies are downloaded and the source code has been compiled perform the following:

Running in NW.js

Open a terminal to: Toby-Master\nwjs and issue the command:

nw.exe c:\path\to\Toby-Master\toby

Running in Electron

Open a terminal to: Toby-Master\electron and issue the command:

electron.exe c:\path\to\Toby-Master\toby

• Node : http://nodejs.org
• Grunt : http://gruntjs.com
• Bower : http://bower.io/

In addition to installing Node on your machine so you can download the dependencies and build the code you'll also need a copy of the Node binaries to place at the root of the source code folder. This is because when NW.js or Electron are executed they will spawn their own external Node process and start the Toby server.

The required Node binaries are located here (for example):

https://nodejs.org/dist/v6.2.0/win-x64/

Here is what the directories look like:

toby source dir:

Install dependencies

npm install   
bower install

The code needs to be built using Grunt

grunt

Important Key Combos:

F1 - Toggles server log
F5 - Usage Info (NOT IMPLEMENTED YET)
F11 - Toggle Fullscreen

In addition to keyboard shortcuts there are commands that can be typed into the search box that will perform various things.

Here is a list (there will be additional ones added soon):

• [name hint] : Lists locally saved videos based on the [name hint]
• /yt [search term] : Searches YouTube for the [search term]
• /g [group name] : Lists the videos for the [group name]
• /list : List all videos contained in the database
• /history : Lists the recently played videos
• /rp or /recently-played : List last 30 recently played videos
• /rps or /recently-played-search : Search recently played videos
• /manage : Manage what groups videos are in and also provide ability to delete videos
• /archive : Export the contents of the database to the data.txt file
• /clear : Clears search results
• /monochrome : (NW.js/Electron only) Short cut to set the monochrome video filter and thumbnails in search results
• /saturate : (NW.js/Electron only) Short cut to set the saturated video filter and thumbnails in search results
• /sepia : (NW.js/Electron only) Short cut to set the sepia video filter and thumbnails in search results
• /normal : (NW.js/Electron only) Short cut to set the normal video filter and thumbnails in search results
• /filter monochrome : (NW.js/Electron only) Short cut to set the monochrome video filter and thumbnails in search results
• /filter saturate : (NW.js/Electron only) Short cut to set the saturated video filter and thumbnails in search results
• /filter sepia : (NW.js/Electron only) Short cut to set the sepia video filter and thumbnails in search results

• Caching YouTube search results for a bit to avoid querying YouTube over and over for the same thing
• Usage info from within the app
• Add /import to import new videos in the data.txt file
• Add better support for larger data sets. Currently if there are a large number of search results (excluding YouTube searches which default to 25 results) all the results will be listed.

Unlike previous versions of Toby the data.txt file located in the data folder is now only used initially to create the database which stores your favorite videos. Videos stored in the database can be exported by entering the /archive command in the search box. A corresponding /import command has not been implemented yet.

The data format for your favorite videos is very simple. It can contain one or more groups. The 'Recently Played' group is special and will be added if it's not present hold the last 30 videos you've recently played.

Data Format:

Group Name {
  Video Title : Video Id
}

See real example below:

Recently Played {
  Sunlight Project feat Danny Claire - Stay (tranzLift Remix) Promo : yWQvWTM7Hqg
  Dash Berlin - Underneath The Sky (Sunsound Chillout Remix) : UEqMD-5urik
  Chris Tomlin - Awake My Soul (with Lecrae) [Lyrics] : fWpvknKuYrg
  Chris Tomlin - Good Good Father (Live at the Grand Ole Opry) : eaqaER7dasY
}

Frank Hale <[email protected]>
2 June 2016

GNU GPL v3 - see LICENSE