Ability to limit only to whitelisted channels in a JSON file?

[caleywoods]

I am starting some research on building a desktop YouTube client, mostly for my son. I have found that by and large, Google's parental controls are not good. My desire is mainly driven by being able to only let him watch whitelisted channels or at a minimum, provide a blacklist.

I am thinking with a whitelist mode a client would loop over this file and use the YT API to only pull in the most recent N videos from those channels and then refer back to this list when a search is performed so that it doesn't show out of scope channels / videos.

I am mainly posting here just to see if someone with experience might be able to chime in to say if this achievable with the YT API given that this electron app looks almost exactly like what I had in my head.

I also thought about just making a Chrome plugin which redirects back to youtube.com if the channel name doesn't exist in the preferences of the plugin or localStorage.

[davidhu2000]

Hi @caleywoods,

I do not foresee this being very difficult to filter out channels, since I will have the channelId when fetching the channel info, and adding additional logic to check if the id exists in a list won't be too difficult.

As for individual videos, i.e. searching for something and clicking on a video, we fetch the video, the details, and comments, all at the same time (or at least consecutively until they are all fetched) then we render, so after all the fetching is done, additional logic will be required at the end to check the video's channel id against the list.

Overall, I don't think it'll be too difficult to implement, it will require extra work to add a way to people to disable/enable this feature. (Maybe just make an empty JSON file, and say if empty, no filter?)