[Feature Request]: Allow for user defined date strings

[grrrrr]

Guidelines

• [X] I have searched the issue tracker for a feature request that matches the one I want to file, without success.
• [X] I have searched the documentation for information that matches the description of the feature request I want to file, without success.

Problem Description

Currently the date field which shows when videos are released, in subscription and individual channel tabs, is set to display x min/hour/day/week/month ago

This makes locating videos released on a specific date very hard to fine, as I and I am sure most people can not easily convert x min/hour/day/week/month ago to a specific date.

Proposed Solution

Have a drop down or custom filed in the settings > general settings that would allow you to define the date display, eg.

• yyyy/mm/dd
• mm/dd/yyyy
• dd/mm/yyyy

This would be somewhat similar to how the history tab displays time, though you can not change the date format there.

This could be considered an extension (but separate) of the Language Preference setting

Alternatives Considered

Other option I can think of is leave behavior as it is and leave end user to convert time frame in head.

Issue Labels

improvement to existing feature, new optional setting

Additional Information

No response

[absidue]

@grrrrr The problem is that because we scrape the YouTube channel page, we don't actually have access to the exact date and time the video was published. YouTube only provides those relative dates on the channel page.

We would only be able to display mostly accurate dates for videos that were published minutes, hours or days ago by comparing the relative timestamps to the current date and time. However for videos that were published weeks or months ago, we would have to display approximate dates e.g. now - 6 months or now - 2 weeks, which could be wrong by up to 31 days or 7 days respectively.

Currently we can't implement this.

[grrrrr]

@absidue Ah ok. How is it done on this history page though? If I have a video on the subscription page with eg a time of 4 weeks ago, if I mark it watched, it shows up in the history page as 08/17/2022 . So the date does seem to be there in some form, even allowing subscription page date as it is on history would be useful

edit: changed example from 2 days to 4 weeks

[absidue]

YouTube's video page includes the timestamp for the exact time and date the video was published, so when FreeTube automatically marks the video as watched on the video page, it has access to that timestamp, which it can add to the history list.

So we may be able to set up some system that stores the timestamps (on your own machine of course) for every video you've watched, but that would mean we would only be able to display accurate timestamps for videos that you've already watched (so anyone that doesn't have the mark as watched setting enabled wouldn't be able to use that feature).

[grrrrr]

sorry, I thought I had crossed all that out quickly after replying. The penny dropped after my reply. Makes perfect sense what you said I'm just slow today!