Youtube98

A simple node.js server meant to be run in local networks to provide retro computers with the ability to open and search for Youtube links in a reasonably modern manner.

This project was inspired by Collin Brockway's retro-video-server, however it is rewritten from scratch with a more robust set of routes in order to more closely mimic the URL structure of the original Youtube website, making for a better replacement in cases of proxying.

Requirements

Host

A reasonably modern server with the following:

Node.js
VLC
yt-dlp
Some form of networking between host and your retro client

To setup the server, run npm install, then modify the config.json.example file to meet your needs and save it as config.json. To use this server, you must register a Google API application in order to obtain a Youtube API key

Client

Network connection
Mozilla-based browser
VLC with NPAPI (Mozilla) plugin

This has been so far tested on a Pentium II laptop running Windows 98 using the RetroZilla 2.2 browser and VLC version 0.8.6i, but should be able to run on any similar combination of hardware and software that meet those requirements.

Standalone usage

The server can be run simply by node server.js, however in order to keep it running more permanently, a monitor such as nodemon can be used. Once you have the server running, simply browse to the URL or IP address in your config on your retro machine.

You can locally redirect traffic to regular Youtube links in your client by adding a line in your client's hosts file to resolve www.youtube.com to your host, and running an nginx proxy in your host, such as:

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name youtube.com www.youtube.com;

	location / {
		proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:3000;
		proxy_set_header   Host $host:$server_port;
	}
}

WebOne integration

It is possible to use WebOne to make a proxy rule which will automatically redirect your browser from Youtube links to your local Youtube98 server. Add the following lines to your webone.conf:

[Edit:^http:\/\/(www.)?youtube.com\/(.*)]
AddInternalRedirect=http://LOCAL_URL:PORT/$2

replacing LOCAL_URL and PORT with the respective values for your own setup.

Lana-chan / youtube98