In my opinion they should print all the annotations with their respective times to the description of the videos that still have them, with a remark like

"Google Backup of annotations:

03:01-3:35 annotation text content"

Or they could keep an archive of the annotations and provide a process for the video owners to choose to have Google 'bake' them into the video permanently after they've been shut off from being used by mainstream YT interfaces. Annotation links could be visually represented in a way that indicates their link could now be found in the description.

Too much effort, won't happen. When you care only about view count and not the content, it's easier to just deprecate and delete.

Agreed. I see it happen all of the time.

Note that that won't suffice for the purposes mentioned above, as oftentimes the annotation would, say, replace a specific word in the text; the replacing word by itself won't be very meaningful, as you won't know what it was intended to replace.

It's still more useful than simply banishing them to the void.

How about adding the coordinates in the screen that it replaces? Some percentage distance from top left.

Even I couldn't reliably determine which word was replaced given screen coordinates, and I spend half my time pushing pixels around (web design & photography).

Yeah, in order for this to be usable, it would need a better UI. Maybe some kind of overlay: it could automatically position the annotations at the correct position relative to the video, and make them appear and disappear at the appropriate times.

I wonder if implementing something like that would be technically feasible.

You are proposing rebuilding the existing feature Google wants to turn off.

That's the joke

They could also add them to a specific captions track

That seems like a good compromise to me too. I can't say that I'm sad to see the annotations go though, they were so often abused that they were permanently turned off on my side, corrections or otherwise. I'm not generally a an of breaking things for the sake of breaking things but I think it's a good move on Google's part.

The abuse could've been stopped very easily. The main problem were link annotations, so a simple popup on click, saying "The video wants to redirect you to [url]." "Continue/cancel" would've been enough. Disallowing annotations in a 10% border inside the video and only allowing all annotations to cover at most 50% of the screen on top that would cover all or the cases I can think of.

Limiting their size would cut down on the clickjacking annotations, but wouldn't deal with the hated "buy our merch!" annotations that were damaging to the video content and led to people turning annotations off. I think simply removing all links would be clear and effective, without damaging the error-correction use.

The third common use that I've seen is linking to other videos, and that's the one that YouTube's replacements systems tackle.

Another somewhat noteworthy thing is that the annotation system is tied to YouTube's channel logo overlay. Once the annotations go, it's likely that the logo will not be hideable anymore.

> and that mobile users couldn't see them...

Which is ENTIRELY on Google.

Same BS answer was made when Google discontinued their "instant search" feature. You could type and search results would pop up while you were typing.

Presumably discontinued because it ate into their ability to show ads, which means that this sounds like a fruitful opportunity for differentiation by search engines that don't rely on ad revenue.

...or they discontinued it because it was a crap experience. I turned off "instant search" in every browser I used. It was awful.

Maybe. But that was not the reason given.

Unfortunately the technology still limits this in many cases.

I genuinely don’t believe it. They’re not using the native video player in their apps. If they can overlay controls they can overlay annotations.

What about the mobile site?

There's no NPAPI plugin required for desktop users to view annotations. All of YouTube works using standardized web tech, and mobile browsers and desktop browsers are the same underlying engines with different chrome. There's no technical reason why annotations couldn't work on the mobile site, though from a UI perspective you'd need to size them appropriately for fingers to interact with. It's not that Google can't, it's that they simply don't want to.

That's not quite true. If you want to view the video in fullscreen on iOS it'll just show the content of the video tag and nothing else. They're working on Fullscreen API support, though.

Same.

I think it’s more to do with Apple actually.

I don’t believe google could place them on a full screen video on iOS.

Huh? I am an iOS developer and I’m certainly not aware of any technical restrictions here.

The YouTube app overlays all kinds of things over full screen video. Link boxes while ads play, for example.

This was more about suitability for the screen format - multiple boxes with small text just didn’t work too well on mobile.

What is or isn’t allowed on iOS limits the Android app? Of course iOS users are a significant amount, but they could do something for only a mere like 90% of their mobile user base. It’s just that annotations weren’t working with their mouse focus, while cards have been there as a replacement since forever in internet age.

(More towards saurik) Maybe it’s very noble to want to hoard annotations on 100 views cat videos from 2009, but I’m sure the amount of significant losses that won’t be solved by simply adding a comment to the video is next to nothing.

Absolutely nothing prevents Youtube from embedding the annotations in the video for playback on restricted devices.

Yes it's at least partly about Apple and it's partly the fact that Apple doesn't allow browser competition (only skinned Safari).

If Apple allowed browser competition then Firefox and Chrome would likely support fullscreen mode (like they both do on Android) and Apple would effectively be pushed to add it to mobile Safari or lose market share.

On the other hand I wish Google would give me the option to bake in the annotations if they're going to remove them. I have a few instructional videos with corrections in the annotations. Those will be gone and the videos will end up being wrong.

The web view is just a widget. If you want to make it full screen, make it full screen. Apple is t stopping you.

OK So I'm trying to understand. This is about using some Google software to annotate videos without actually changing the underlying video? I'm made annotations, but always in my video software (openshot or whatever) so they are baked into the video. They should still work ok. It would be pretty easy to do this for things you really needed. Just import your video and add some keyframes with the overlay. Or maybe you lose your URL when you edit?

and just not leave everything up to Google to decide in the future IMHO.

EDIT: reading farther down, I see the answer to the latter half: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18540470

That is one solution.

For me the issue is time. Adding the annotation took 1-2 mins. Downloading the video on youtube (since I no longer have the source material), then loading that into some video editor, adding the annotations, rendering it, and re-uploading it would easily take 1hr per video. So IMO it's not really a good solution. I don't have the time.

Personally I think they should keep the annotations and keep the source video. When you change the annotations they can re-render the video on their end. Keep the 1-2 minute workflow

Using webkit engine to build a browser is not skinning Safari.

There is much more to the browser than rendering engine.

But as far as what APIs you can expose to JS there is a limit. Can you expose WebGL2? Fullscreen? Screen Orientatio API? WebVR? WebAssembly? Input type=Color, OffscreenCanvas? or do you have to wait for Apple to add them to the base iOS WebKit? Can you fix the fact that iOS Safari shows very poor performance animating while streaming assets?

The youtube app has its own frontend for video playback.

True, but not within safari.

Why anybody would play YouTube videos in Safari on iOS? Don't tell me iOS don't open YouTube links in YouTube app automatically?

Why should I install a separate app just for Youtube when the website works fine?

I thought the premise of this subthread was that the website doesn't work fine.

I find it infuriating when I am on google, click a link and the yelp app just opens without any sort of warning. Youtube isnt far behind. If i already had something open in one of those apps, and was coming back to it, my state is cleared.

That doesn't happen if you don't have the yelp app installed.

Don't reward their shitty dark patterns[0] by installing their app. They have a site that is perfectly amenable to being consumed in a web browser on your phone. They're _already done the work_ to make it work well on your phone, but then they kneecapped it and turned the hard work of all those engineers and designers into lead-gen for their app so they can get your location data.

m.yelp.com: This page will open in another application.

me: tHiS PAgE wiLl OPEn iN aNOtheR ApPliCaTIon.

[0] You can only see the first few pictures, you can only read the first fifty words of each review, and every attempt to go beyond that[1] is met with a redirect to the App Store app

[1] no, they don't make it clear that clicking that "read more" link is going to send you to another app.

to me its more the operating system and or browser fault.

we have PROTOCOL already. if i want it to open in yelp it should either start the link with yelp:// or food:// and my os should default to my default food app. if its https:// keep it in my damn browser. google should let me set link rewrite settings per site or type, if i say for example WANT https://youtube to be rewritten on the fly as youtube://filename

I use Brave to watch videos, never the Youtube app, which I don't have installed. It at least gives the illusion that I have control over the requests Youtube is making from my phone. God only knows how much sneaky data collection they do with the app...

Permissions requested on Android: Camera, microphone, contacts, storage.

Because YouTube has entirely ethical and noninvasive reasons for needing access to contact data and unprompted file storage.

For Android there is F-Droid.

> Lightweight YouTube frontend that's supposed to be used without the proprietary YouTube-API or any of Google's (proprietary) play-services.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

It even allows to stream audio only while turning the screen off.

Can you record videos with the youtube app? that would explain Camera and microphone.

Contacts is probably for sharing videos and storage might be cache?

Used to be if you used Safari you can play video in the background. On iPad it also meant you can get picture-in-picture. Not sure if those "tricks" still work.

Can confirm this doesn't work anymore, and hasn't for a while actually. (There is, however, a wonderful Jailbreak tweak that restores the functionality.)

Try Opera Mini on IOS.

Which is one reason, among many, for YouTube to build a native application.

They already have one. I think they had one on the very first iPhone even.

iPhone owner since the very first iPhone - I know ;)

Can you make them non-interactable and bake them in there? Maybe a second layer video shown on top?

How does the endscreen functionality work then?

You can't and never could do so why implement it?

I can empathize with content creators on this. Especially on technical and/or scientific videos. I believe the description can be edited after publishing. I've also found them to be abused, and that's why I've had them disabled for quite some time.

There is a reason you can't edit a video after it's uploaded. Because you could upload a good video, get it to go viral, and switch it out with an advertisement or something else that isn't worthy of attention.

> FWIW, this was effectively the only way to fix content after it had been posted without changing the URL

Is it not possible to re-upload a video to Youtube?

You can always reupload, but the new video will have a different link. Which is a nightmare if it got popular on a link aggregation site.

Worse, there was content on YouTube that used the annotation system to implement choose-your-own-adventure type stories and hidden easter egg videos. That content is now not just wrong, it's broken and unusable.

It's almost become the Google motto of late that they will break their own products and make your existing content unusable in some way.