Glass

A glassmorphic YouTube frontend for Windows. Pure custom UI — Piped for browse / search / metadata, yt-dlp for the actual video streams.

Architecture

• Browse (trending, search, channels, your subscription feed) → Piped public API. Instance list is auto-refreshed from Piped's index on startup, with multi-instance failover.
• Stream URLs → local yt-dlp.exe, run as a subprocess. This is what makes Glass actually keep working: requests come from your home IP, sidestepping the "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" wall that periodically takes down Piped instances.
• Account (optional) → either a Piped account (username/password, no email) or real Google sign-in via OAuth (you provide your own Cloud OAuth client ID — see Google sign-in setup below).

What's built in

• Custom UI: dark glassmorphic shell with frosted cards, animated gradient blobs, custom titlebar.
• Ad/tracker blocking: request-level blocking in the Electron main process via a curated domain + pattern list (uBO-style, not literally uBlock Origin since uBO is a browser extension that can't run in Electron). Edit adblock.js to extend.
• YouTube Takeout import: drop the CSV or JSON from takeout.google.com into Glass — works with or without a Piped account.
• Google sign-in (real OAuth): after a one-time setup of your own Google Cloud OAuth client, Glass auto-pulls your real YouTube subscriptions via the YouTube Data API. Tokens stored locally; refreshes silently. See setup below.
• YouTube URL paste: paste any youtube.com/watch?v=…, youtu.be/…, or /shorts/… link into the search box and it jumps straight to that video.

Run

You need Node.js 18+ and npm. Then either double-click run.bat or:

cd youtube-glass
npm install
npm start

First launch downloads Electron (~100 MB). The first time you click Install yt-dlp in the banner at the top of the window, the app fetches yt-dlp.exe (~17 MB) from the official GitHub releases into Electron's user-data directory. After that, both are cached.

If you'd rather provide yt-dlp yourself, drop yt-dlp.exe at:

%APPDATA%\youtube-glass\yt-dlp.exe

Google sign-in setup (one-time)

Glass uses your own OAuth Client ID — the app never proxies your YouTube data through anyone else's project. Trade-off: 5 minutes of clicking in the Google Cloud Console.

1. Create a project at console.cloud.google.com/projectcreate.
2. Enable the YouTube Data API v3 for that project.
3. OAuth consent screen: choose External → fill the required fields (app name, your email) → add scope youtube.readonly → add your own email under Test users. (Leave the app in Testing status — no verification needed for personal use.)
4. Credentials → Create Credentials → OAuth client ID → Desktop app → name it whatever → Copy the Client ID.
5. In Glass: Sign in → "Sign in with Google" → paste the Client ID → "Save and sign in". Your default browser opens to Google's consent screen. Approve, and Glass picks up the rest automatically.

On first sign-in, Google may show "Google hasn't verified this app" — that's expected because the OAuth client is your own. Click Advanced → Go to (project) (unsafe). It's safe; the project is yours.

Tokens are stored at %APPDATA%\youtube-glass\google-auth.json. To disconnect, use the account panel's Disconnect Google button.

Customize

• Piped instance — renderer/api.js. The app refreshes the live list from Piped's index on boot; the seed list at the top is the fallback.
• Adblock list — extend AD_DOMAINS / AD_PATTERNS in adblock.js.
• Theme — CSS variables at the top of renderer/styles.css drive every color.

Caveats

• yt-dlp itself updates often to keep pace with YouTube changes. To upgrade it, delete %APPDATA%\youtube-glass\yt-dlp.exe and click Install yt-dlp again.
• "Up next" suggestions come from the channel's recent uploads (since yt-dlp doesn't have access to YouTube's recommendation algorithm without a logged-in session).
• Account login is per-Piped-instance — accounts don't sync across instances. If your instance disappears, your subscription list goes with it; export it via the account panel before that happens (or rely on the Takeout import to rebuild).