Fantasy wish list for features?

[gregglind]

@dmhacker how would you WANT THIS SKILL to work / be architected, if you could do anything? For me, YouTube has good search, huge availability to content, but the video to audio transforming step is weirdly stupid and wasteful. I wonder if using a 3rd party MP3 censersion service would make the setup and deploy easier?

[dmhacker]

That would be nice and certainly is possible. The only issue with using a 3rd party service is that they may not have very clean API's and may enforce rate limits. The server that I'm using right now to convert people's videos to audio doesn't have those restrictions. Additionally, the audio transforming step with ffmpeg is necessary so that Alexa can play the mp3 file. Without this step, Alexa wouldn't be able to play the audio; this was actually an issue for a while. Do you know of anything that could be used to circumvent this though?

[dionbreg]

Hi. How can I setup a slot (or any other way of doing this) so that YouTube plays a particular playlist (for example, my YouTube favorites playlist)?. I have tried giving my playlist a unique name on YouTube, but a can't get it to work. Thanks for your help.

[dmhacker]

@dionbreg There is not currently functionality for this. I will consider adding at a later date. Perhaps make a new issue with this specifically?

[dionbreg]

I did. Thanks David.

On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 2:53 PM, David Hacker - notifications@github.com < github.home.d6bf4e6299.notifications#reply@reply.github.com> wrote:

@dionbreg https://github.com/dionbreg There is not currently functionality for this. I will consider adding at a later date. Perhaps make a new issue with this specifically?

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/dmhacker/alexa-youtube-skill/issues/11#issuecomment-346971576, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AcUrdYVCBgXQMenC3Qf1WFIwOzCWlV6kks5s6JqGgaJpZM4O8lu5 .

[dmhacker]

Enhancements to be made in the future:

• [x] Improve performance/bandwidth usage by downloading audio directly rather than converting from video to audio
• [x] Implement HelpIntent so that users can get an overview of how to query the skill
• [x] Add support for French
• [ ] Add support for Echo Show (requires video output from the server)
• [ ] Enable YouTube tracks to be played rather than just individual songs
• [ ] Add HTTPS support so the skill doesn't have to be run from Lambda

^{_{These are given in order of priority.}}

[dmhacker]

Intermediate conversion between video and audio files has been removed. ffmpeg directly processes the stream.

See https://github.com/dmhacker/dmhacker-youtube/commit/7a17c75386afea0010f89fd4e08e7fef6eee8774.

The server no longer has any reliance on ffmpeg at all. Audio is downloaded directly from YouTube using itag value '140' (128 kbps) and is saved to an m4a file.

See https://github.com/dmhacker/dmhacker-youtube/commit/3c235c6d431348475951a5b34cea01185017f785

[badbob001]

It would be nice to treat the search results itself as a playlist and allow for continuous playback of the results. This should include support for next, previous, repeat, loop, etc.