Greasy Fork

Seems to be broken again.
The home and subscriptions pages work fine, but the sidebar recommendations next to videos don't animate anymore.

I see you are correct about the sidebar stopped working. It looks like some Youtube website changes have caused it. If one turns on video previews in the user settings then the animated thumbnails come back for the sidebar but then you also have the inline video style previews on the homepage which we want to avoid. I should be able to get a fix working for this but probably not until next week.

Thanks for the update. In the meanwhile, the subscriptions and home pages have also stopped animating, with video previews disabled now it doesn't work anywhere, and with video previews enabled it works on the sidebar, but on the subscriptions and home pages it's the inline video previews.

It's still working for me with the homepage and subscription page (with video previews disabled in youtube user settings) so perhaps double check the script is still enabled, but if you're still affected maybe Youtube is doing another experiment on some user accounts.

Script is definitely enabled, seems to be some new A/B testing, I could describe it but I don't think that'll provide enough info to pre-patch it lol. It's very similar to how the new sidebars are, so it'll probably come to all accounts within a couple months tops, (with video previews disabled) when interacting with a video or thumbnail the background, containing the title thumbnail etc, highlights until you let go of your current interaction.

That sucks, and yeah I probably can't pre-patch until I see it on my own account. Although I have just released v3 of the userscript that has a fix for the sidebar, if we are lucky it may do something for your homepage too. Let me know if so.

Thanks for the fix! The sidebar works as intended, but unfortunately it had no effect on the Subscriptions page, though I just noticed that only my Subscriptions page is being A/B tested, so my Home page is still the old version (Before the sidebar and Subscription pages got updated). You can (probably) test which version you're on by seeing if your middle and right click also highlight the selected video background, as I noticed that on the older homepage version, only left click has this interaction, and on the new versions it's left, middle, and right click.

OK, I tried your middle/right click method and both my homepage and subscriptions page are the old/working version. Unfortunately I don't think I can do anything at the moment regarding a fix for your new subscription page, if/when it gets rolled out to my account I will be able to investigate the possibility of a fix then (no guarantees a fix is even possible, at some point I'm expecting a permanently breaking youtube change, sort of surprised the fixes have lasted this long tbh).

@seekhare You're a legend, created an acc just to say thank you for this script.

@MonolithOrchid thanks, it's nice to hear :)

@zfgfade I now got the new homepage UI where the animated thumbs aren't working. I've added back a carousel fallback for now released as userscript v4.0.
It's not looking promising about restoring the GIF style animated thumbs as the URLs for these need to be provided by Youtube, i.e. it's not something I can generate via the video id or some such, and they don't seem to be available on the new homepage style. I'll see if anything else is possible later.

Thanks for the update! This is very interesting because this is ANOTHER new homepage design, where the highlight behind the video now appears already when hovering and reflects the average colour of the thumbnail. As of now, the homepage with this new fancy style, and the sidebar are working with the webp animations, and my subscriptions page seems to have the same style as the sidebar but unfortunately still doesn't work with v4.0 of the userscript.

I looked into how the animated webp previews work, and to my knowledge there's no way to programmatically get the link to these with only the video URL, as the `sqp=` and `rs=` values are server-side tokens with secrets, so they need to be dynamically fetched from the website html data? If I understand that correctly.

How would the issue of these not being available arise? I mean as in would YouTube most likely just stop generating them? Or would they no longer supply the data necessary to find the links to them.

Interesting to hear there is a new new homepage, the homepage I currently have seems as you previously described where a middle click gives a gray background. Good if the userscript works with the new new fancy homepage. My subscription page is still old style and thumbs are working. So it seems there is a lot of flux in the UI and a/b testing at the moment.

Regarding the an_webp urls that is right there are these secret tokens that need to be provided and I think there is no chance of generating them client-side. They are included in the content from Youtube servers, but on the homepage I currently have (probably your subscription page) the url for the an_webp is not present in the HTML/JSON content from Youtube's servers. They are still generating the an_webp images for those videos behind the scenes as they get used on other pages like the sidebar and the search results page but the issue is they aren't providing the urls on the homepage/subscription pages affected by the UI changes discussed.

So that presents two options to my mind, (1) can the an_webp urls be got via another endpoint or (2) can the youtube servers be made to include the an_webp url in it's responses again.
The answer to (1) is yes-but-no: the search endpoint (user facing search page) can be given a videoID and still currently has an_webp urls in its response content but this pollutes the user's search history with a gazillion videoIDs so is a no-go. And besides that the other endpoints I know of that include it you can't specify videoIDs, they are like a random bunch of videos for loading more sidebar videos, for example. But maybe there is an endpoint somewhere that I just don't know about.
(2) I don't know the answer but it would be tricky to figure out if so as everything Youtube does is quite obfuscated, nothing stood out to me in terms of request parameters or cookies so it's probably not possible this way.

The fallback option in v4.0 is supposed to do a slideshow of 3 static images, there must be some difference between HTML elements for the grid on the subscription page you have and the homepage I have as to why that's not working for you there.

Since you advise there is a new fancy homepage with colour highlight backgrounds that is working with the animated thumbs, I think for now I will hope they roll out that version (or rollback to the old working version) more widely as the new style of homepage and subscription page since then everything will just work again.

Thank you again for the consistent updates, and the explanation!

Currently the subscriptions page and sidebar work nearly perfectly, sometimes (maybe when initially loading) it falls back to cycling the 3 thumbnail previews. Though that's not an issue and I'm too tired right now to test it further.

The home page doesn't seem to have changed since last time, but is always falling back to the thumbnail previews instead of the an_webp, I'm assuming YouTube still hasn't pushed that design experiment to many accounts.

It's also interesting that the 3 thumbnail preview fallback acts as a new type of preview for age restricted videos and videos which don't have an an_webp preview for whatever reason. I like it because you can still tell that the video is age restricted or limited in some way, but there's a preview when you don't have an an_webp nor an inline video player.

@zfgfade Regarding your homepage I must have misunderstood a previous comment and thought that was working with an_webp for you already but if it's not then maybe we can try figure it out.

Firstly when you are on the homepage is the address bar still showing www.youtube.com/ or www.youtube.com i.e. just the base youtube url there is no path like www.youtube.com/home ? As the code I have checks that the url is the base url or subscription page to run the "get an_webp" logic, if they changed it that would affect things.

Secondly if you are able to open your browser developer tools console whilst on the Youtube homepage (ctrl+shift+i shortcut and select the console tab) you should see somewhere a log saying "UserScript Restore YT Animated Thumbs: Enabling carousel fallback where an_webp not available." and anywhere after that are there any suspicious error log messages, if so what do they say?

Sorry disregard that, everything works well currently. If it stops working, I'll make sure to have a look in the console.

YouTube is doing almost daily experiments now, I currently have a new style for the video player controls (it's not bad but a bit buggy, looks like a TV streaming service UI).