Ypb — A playback for YouTube live streams

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Rewind to past moments in live streams and play or download excerpts

Ypb is a playback tool for YouTube live streams written in Go. It provides MPEG-DASH access to past moments in live streams, allowing you to rewind beyond the web player's limits, play selected excerpts instantly in any compatible player, or download them as local files.

Features

• Standalone CLI and proxy streaming server for playback
• Rewind precisely to past moments far beyond the web player’s limits
• Play excerpts immediately without downloading
• Works with any MPEG-DASH compatible player or downloader
• Leverages yt-dlp for reliable video info extraction and downloading

Overview

Ypb can run in two modes: serve or download. Run the streaming proxy server and make rewind requests to compose static or dynamic MPEG-DASH manifests, or download excerpts to local files with a single command.

Installation

Ypb works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Read the Installation guide for different ways to install and run ypb.

Showcase

Download stream excerpts

Download the latest 10 minutes from a live stream to a local file:

$ ypb download --interval 10m/now Mm_zVDDUeNA && ls
Live-and-Just-Hatched-Royal_Mm_zVDDUeNA_20260208T054630+00_10m.mp4

Or download a similar excerpt from one day ago:

$ ypb download --interval now-1d10m/now-1d Mm_zVDDUeNA && ls
Live-and-Just-Hatched-Royal_Mm_zVDDUeNA_20260207T054630+00_10m.mp4

Serve stream excerpts

Start the playback server to enable rewind requests:

ypb serve --port 8080 Mm_zVDDUeNA

With the server running, you can preview rewind excerpts, for example, with ffplay:

ffplay -autoexit -protocol_whitelist file,http,https,tcp,tls \
  http://localhost:8080/mpd/10m--now

Or download them with yt-dlp:

yt-dlp http://localhost:8080/mpd/10m--now

License

MIT.