I’d like to start discussion here regarding Unity’s remote video search feature.
In the past Unity had controversial feature called SmartScopes Search which used Canonical’s servers to perform search in various web resources (mostly Amazon if I remember correctly). If I am not wrong most people disliked this feature due to privacy reasons and tended to disable it.
During my work on Ubuntu Unity 26.04 one of my tasks is to migrate Unity components from deprecated libsoup2 library (used for creating requests to remote servers, mostly HTTP(S)). One of the packages which require migration is responsible for performing video search in the dash. This package currently uses (already disabled long time ago) Ubuntu/Canonical’s servers to request video search in remote resources which of course is (or rather was, bcause it no longer works for years already) a privacy threat. And here is my question what would you like to have:
- Drop remote search capability completely and search only local videos,
- Integrate dash video search with
yt-dlpbut keep local video search as default what user wants.
With option 2 if yt-dlp is installed and when user types in dash ytsearch: SOME VIDEO the dash will call yt-dlp to fetch matching YouTube videos, their descriptions and thumbnails and show them in the dash (in some pretty form). Once one of the videos gets selected in the dash, it can be watched in VLC (or maybe some other video player?) with selected quality (can be selected before playback) or downloaded with specified quality.
Personally I’d like to go for option 2 but I want to see what you think of this feature.