MinPluto Development Update

What is MinPluto?

MinPluto is a modern privacy frontend for YouTube and Twitch giving you total anonymity. It provides additional features such as an account system, no annoying ads, multilingual support, custom video player, and additional customization.

Current State

YouTube frequently updates the way their backend operates, Invidious API works but gets constantly blocked on a lot of instances including mine. With the various changes implemented by YouTube this year, users have been receiving messages like “This helps protect our community.” and “Please sign in to confirm you’re not a bot”.

MinPluto depends heavily on Invidious API to bring YouTube support. Given these circumstances, MinPluto intends to no longer provide support for YouTube. Are there not already an abundance of YouTube interfaces available? MinPluto does not want to simply be another YouTube interface at the moment.

What Now?

Platforms

MinPluto will keep providing support to Twitch with the help of the SafeTwitch backend API. Huge thanks to dragongoose for their SafeTwitch project and for their help.

Given that we have already discussed YouTube, it might be worth exploring the possibility of adding additional platforms. Currently, I am thinking about Peertube and/or Odysee as options. Also, integrating platforms like Vimeo and Bilibill may be more challenging at the moment, but I would also like to consider adding them in the far future.

Rewrite Planned

I will be making significant revisions to MinPluto, including rewriting it to mainly use MinPluto’s own UI component library, Polestar, for a complete overhaul of the user interface. I aim to improve navigation for both desktop and mobile platforms using Polestar, while also ensuring design consistency across all of the pages. I would like to prioritize adding a “Light Mode” for accessibility reasons, even though some may not prefer it. This option is necessary to provide a more comfortable viewing experience for certain users. The default theme setting will be “System Theme”, will be changable in the settings menu.

The account system will need to be revamped as well. MinPluto plans to continue using Supabase because it was the easier stack to work with during early development a year ago. Although there is a possibility of experimenting with something else, the preference is to stick with Supabase to keep things simple. One of the tasks that still needs to be addressed is figuring out how to implement an import/export function and manage such data.

I will enhance the API in MinPluto to increase its capabilities for retrieving data from various platforms and managing accounts.

Update: November 1st, 2024

Branding Update

The logo for both MinPluto and Zorn Player have been updated. The corner radius in MinPluto’s logo is more constistant and the letter “P” now only shows an outline stroke instead of being filled in all white. The letter “M” didn’t get much change.

The Zorn Player logo was completely overhauled, as it’s previous logo was too abstract and it was originally suppose to be temporary anyway. It’s shape is suppose to represent a letter “Z” in a way.

Feedback is always welcomed for any changes that SudoVanilla makes to it’s projects and branding. You can email me “feedback@sudovanilla” or mention “@sudovanilla@social.sudovanilla.org” on Mastodon or generally the Fediverse.

Zorn Player

Zorn Player, a MinPluto project, will be getting focused too while MinPluto is getting overhauled.

Zorn Player still has functions that need to be added and addressed. Such as gestures for mobile support, improved subtitles, dedicated inline-player UI, improved feedback, pop-up mode, presentation mode, audio-only mode, and other minor things.