Feature Request: Exclude shorts

[mashed2648]

Shorts currently dominate the subscription section, which is already sort of hard to sift through. Appreciate the work so far!

[iBicha]

Thanks for the suggestion! I agree with the need for this feature, Although, this is more of an Invidious feature than a Playlet feature, because if you don't want to see shorts, you'd want that consistently between the two.
It looks like this has been requested many times and is being addressed based on the thread in iv-org/invidious#2585 (although it's a thread from over two years ago)

I'll leave this issue open since I'm not aware of a way to distinguish between a short and a regular video from the Invidious API alone, and also to track the feature

[midwesternrodent]

I read through the Invidious thread, and looked into a couple of options for my private instance, but..... the ublock origin hack works on my PCs well enough and I use clipious on mobile with a video filter just to hide any videos under 60 seconds so I'd rather not do the fork recommended by miangraham just to fix this incredibly minor annoyance on playlet.

Now I'm not sure how Clipious is implementing their video filters, and having toyed around with trying to keep my Roku completely offline but still using a few apps I'm well aware of how anti-consumer and just plain annoying their systems can be to work with at times. So I understand if it's just not possible on playlet due to those constraints.

However, have you considered implementing a simple length filter (as stated above, I know nothing is simple on Roku) like Clipious does? I think that would go a long way toward improving the user experience if that data is available through the invidious API.

Of course, regardless, I love the application and you're doing great work. You were my gateway to the wonderful world that is Invidious and I'm loving every minute of hosting my own private instance.

[iBicha]

@midwesternrodent thanks for your comment and your thoroughness
I've given it a lot of thought in the past year, but never got to prioritize it due to the difficulty to execute this correctly without any side effects to anyone.
Introducing a filter can be problematic in many ways:

• Sometimes videos do not have the length, or the right length, due to many reasons, it being a video is live or about to go live. Another thing it that Invidious has a cache of the videos info, so the length info we have not only can be off, but it can also be delayed/out of sync
• Introducing this filter with many uncertainties is bound to create that many false positives. Eventually users will start to complain that regular videos do not show up on Playlet but show up in YouTube, and then we'll need to investigate that.
• If we have a feed that has an overwhelming amount of shorts, Playlet will need to fetch many pages to a feed (say subscriptions) to load the number of videos that should show on screen, e.g. we'd need to load 2-3 pages to have 10 videos. This means longer load times and poorer user experience. Roku device are low powered and we should offload processing to backends when possible.

This is why it is still in my opinion that right now the best way to approach this is to take the DB query you linked in Invidious and link it to a user preference. It makes this feature waaaay simpler.

Nonetheless, maybe it is worth trying an implementation in Playlet some day, but currently my priority is more towards bugs preventing watching videos and such
cheers

[iBicha]

Update: Since adding a built-in backend, it has become simple (I think) to distinguish between videos and shorts.
There's some refactor to do with settings (and probably need a new section) after that this feature becomes fairly doable