v1.14.6
YouTube tracks now play all the way through instead of stopping after about thirty seconds. The web player is temporarily offline while the rest of this lands.
The thirty-second cut-off has been blamed on a YouTube limit since 1.4.14. That was half right — the limit is real, but it only applies to one kind of stream, and there was another kind available the whole time that nobody was reading.
The web player is temporarily offline
Rather than leave the player half-working while this lands, /play now says plainly that it is being rebuilt. Search, albums, artists, playlists and your library are unaffected and work normally, and so does the Android app.
Songs stopped after about thirty seconds
YouTube offers two kinds of audio for a video: an audio-only stream, and a combined audio-and-video one. The app only ever looked at the audio-only kind. That kind stops serving after about a megabyte — roughly half a minute of music — and no amount of retrying moves the line. The combined kind has no such limit. Measured on the same video, in the same minute, with the same credentials: the audio-only stream refused everything past one megabyte, while the combined stream served the whole file. Four songs were then downloaded end to end and checked against their real lengths — 4:16, 5:40, 4:41 and 5:32, all exact. The combined stream carries a video track that gets thrown away, so it uses more data for the same music, and that is a fair trade for a song that actually finishes.
Most of the connection attempts were being wasted
The app introduces itself to YouTube as one of several devices, and works down the list until one answers. The list was in the wrong order. Testing all ten identities against the same song: only one of them returned anything playable, and it was near the bottom — so almost every play started with a string of refusals before reaching the one that works. It is now first. One identity that had been on the list for months turns out to be rejected outright and has been dropped.
Some tracks were handed a stream the browser would not accept
The combined stream is labelled as video by YouTube, because technically it is. A browser audio player refuses anything labelled that way, even though it plays the file perfectly once told it is audio. The label is now corrected on the way out. The audio itself is untouched.