Starting today, Breadcrum now supports Bluesky episode extraction. This capability comes from the excellent upstream work in the yt-dlp project, so kudos to the contributors there.
Bluesky videos are currently limited to 50MB and 30 seconds, so you won’t be saving much long-form content to listen to later. However, I expect these limits to increase in the future. It’s exciting to see support grow for Twitter alternatives.
An interesting detail is that this feature came to Breadcrum as an automatic update. I architected Breadcrum to inherit new features and capabilities quickly and painlessly. It’s incredibly satisfying to see this decision pay off.
Update on the yt-dlp situation
You may have noticed, or found out about Breadcrum due to the recent changes being implemented at YouTube.
Most notably, YouTube is making it more difficult to run tools like yt-dlp in hosted and cloud environments and is causing disruption for Breadcrum and other related services.
Previously, all media discovery in Breadcrum was done solely through yt-dlp.
yt-dlp has no immediate or short-term solutions to address this issue other than to run using consumer home internet connections.
While that is a possibility (Anyone remember AudioGalaxy satellite?), Breadcrum has found a workaround for the time being.
Breadcrum now has a pluggable extraction proxy that can swap in different media extraction tools and solutions quickly. We’re currently running a custom solution that’s working well. When that fails, I’m hoping our time to ship alternative media extraction tools are cut down to days rather than weeks.
Other Updates
Service updates have been slower this year, for which I apologize. Breadcrum is undergoing a much-needed back-end refactor (adding types for those interested). This cleanup addresses some long-running technical debt and will hopefully pay off over the coming years. Here are our priorities before the end of the year:
- Improved initial bookmark extraction
- Utilize client, archive, and episode metadata when populating bookmark details initially
- Improved bookmark create form
- Media remux into cloud storage (Paid feature)
- Better format support and personal archiving of media
Hope everyone is having a good year and, as always, feel free to share ideas, requests or other thoughts you have when using Breadcrum.