Cliptube — watch the clipboard for YouTube links and preview them

This macOS utility watches the clipboard for YouTube video links and opens them in a player window for quick access.

Requirements

The application has been developed on macOS Catalina (10.15) and also requires at least that version.

Notes

This app grew out of my frustration when trying to view any YouTube video in a private browsing window and being bombarded by sign-in and data sharing consent popups.

Usage

Start the application and copy any link(s) to a YouTube video to your clipboard (pasteboard). A window containing a native macOS video player for that video should pop up. You should also be able to manually paste YouTube video URLs.

The application menu contains a toggle for whether the clipboard should be watched for new links or not.

Contact & Support

Please report any issues on GitHub.

Source Notes

• This is my first Swift project, but relies on classic Cocoa / AppKit for the "UI".
• Dabbling in Combine.framework just for the NSPasteboard publisher is probably overkill (or really half-hearted).
• Making an NSDocument-based application work for viewing non-local file URLs is a bit of a challenge (or hack).

Acknowledgements

This software is built on the experience of others:

• XCDYouTubeKit by Cédric Luthi is used to look up the available media streams for a YouTube ID.