I’ll admit it: the mini-project that I have been working on may not have been a good idea.

The project, which I gave the codename Lorikeet, was to provide a way to stream YouTube videos to a Chromecast without using the YouTube app. Using the YouTube app is becoming a real pain. Ads aside, they’ve completely replaced the Chromecast experience from a very basic viewing destination to something akin to a Google TV, complete with recommendations of “Breaking News” from news services that I have no interest in seeing.

So I spent some time trying to build something to avoid the YouTube app completely, using a mixture of youtube-dl, a Buffalo web-app, and a Flutter mobile app. I spent the last week on it (it’s not pretty so no screenshots), but at this stage I don’t see much point continuing to work on it.

For one, the experience is far from perfect. Video loading is slow and there are cases when the video pauses due to buffering. I’m sure there are ways around this, but I really don’t want to spend the time learning how to do this.

It was also expensive. I have a Linode server running in Sydney which acts as a bit of a hobby server (it’s also running Pagepark to serve this site); but in order to be closer to the YouTube CDNs that are closer to me, I had to rent a server that would run in Melbourne. And there are not many VPS hosting providers that offer hosting here.

So I went with Google Cloud.

Now, I’m sure there’s a lot to like about Google Cloud, but I found its VPS hosting to be quite sub-par. For just over $10 USD a month, I had a Linux virtual server with 512 MB of RAM, 8 GB of storage, and a CPU which I’d imagine is throttled all the way back as trying to do anything of significants slowed it to a crawl. I had immense issues installing OS updates, getting the Dokku based web-app deployed, and trying to avoid hitting the storage limit.

For the same amount of money, Linode offers me a virtual server with 2 GB of RAM, 50 GB of storage, and a real virtual CPU. This server is running 4 Dokku apps, 3 of them with dedicated PostgreSQL databases, and apart from occasionally needing to remove dangling Docker images, I’ve had zero issues with it. None! (The podcasters were right).

Where was I? Oh, yeah. So, that’s the reason why I’m abandoning this project and will need to re-evaluate my online video watching experience. I might give Plex a try, although before doing something like setting up a dedicated media server, I’ll probably just use the Mac Mini I’ve been using for a desktop in the short term.

So, yeah, that’s it. It’s hard to abandon a project you spent any amount of time on. I suppose the good thing is that I got to play around with Flutter and learnt how to connect to a Chromecast using Dart, so it’s not a complete waste.