YourPipe (iOS MVP)

A SwiftUI iOS app for searching and playing YouTube videos with local subscriptions and a mini player.

Features

• Video / channel / playlist search
• Full-screen playback screen with AVKit
• Mini player pinned above the tab bar
• Local channel subscriptions (JSON-backed, on-device)
• Subscription feed of recent uploads
• Background audio and Picture-in-Picture (within iOS limits)

Tech Stack

• SwiftUI + AVFoundation / AVKit
• XcodeGen (project.yml)
• InnerTube-based YouTube extractor with an ANDROID_VR → ANDROID → IOS client waterfall
• Optional Piped fallback (multi-instance)
• Local AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate HLS proxy for on-the-fly n-param decoding

Requirements

• Xcode 15+
• iOS 16+
• XcodeGen

Run

1. Generate the project:

   xcodegen generate

2. Open YourPipe.xcodeproj.
3. Build and run the YourPipe target.

Project Structure

• YourPipe/YourPipeApp.swift — app entry, environment wiring
• YourPipe/ContentView.swift — tab shell and mini player bar
• YourPipe/PlaybackController.swift — AVPlayer orchestration, PiP, Now Playing, stream-refresh recovery
• YourPipe/PlaybackResolver.swift — cached resolver with inflight deduplication and first-byte warmup
• YourPipe/YouTubePlaybackService.swift — InnerTube client waterfall, n-param JS decoder, client cooldown / backoff, optional poToken hook
• YourPipe/HLSProxy.swift — HLS playlist rewriter for throttling parameter decoding
• YourPipe/YouTubeSearchService.swift — search / channel / feed parsing via InnerTube
• YourPipe/SubscriptionStore.swift — on-disk subscription persistence
• YourPipe/AppSettingsStore.swift — playback-source preference

Playback Source Modes

Selectable from the in-app Settings tab:

• Direct YouTube — InnerTube clients only.
• Piped proxy — community Piped instances only.
• Auto — tries Direct first, falls back to Piped on failure.

Anti-Ban Hardening

The direct path follows techniques used by NewPipe/yt-dlp to reduce rate-limit and LOGIN_REQUIRED responses:

• Sequential client waterfall with randomised jitter between attempts (no parallel bursts from a single IP).
• Per-client cooldown with exponential backoff on 403 / 429 / anti-bot statuses, honouring Retry-After.
• Device-locale-based hl / gl / UTC offset (no hard-coded en/US).
• Lazy visitorData fetch — no cold-start request on app launch.
• Mid-playback 403 recovery: a fresh resolve with position-restore before any user-visible error is surfaced.
• Optional PoTokenProvider protocol; when a provider is installed the service appends pot= to stream URLs.

Client versions and n-param patterns should be re-synced periodically against upstream references:

• yt-dlp — yt_dlp/extractor/youtube/_base.py (INNERTUBE_CLIENTS)
• NewPipeExtractor — YoutubeParsingHelper.java, YoutubeThrottlingParameterUtils.java

Notes

• MVP-quality codebase, actively iterated on.
• Playback strategies depend on YouTube-side changes and may require recurring fixes. Treat the extractor layer as maintenance code.