DEV Community: Tushar

A television with no skip button

Tushar — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:18:06 +0000

This is a submission for the MLH x DEV Writing Challenge

What I Built

Reels trained my thumb to leave. A clip has a few seconds before I decide it owes me a different clip. I missed the other feeling: a television that is already on, in the middle of something, with nothing under the glass except the picture.

1988.in is that set. You press the glass to turn it on and land in the middle of whatever is on air. There is no progress bar and no next clip waiting. If you want a different picture, you change the channel.

The lineup opens the way an evening in India used to. Channel 001 is Bollywood. Then cricket, Jungle Book, Shaktimaan, a month of DD Classics, Ramayan, and Mahabharat. After those come animals, street food, space, sport, and travel, and then the quieter stations: rain, a hearth, a forest, a lake. Channel 013, Vintage India, is a curated run of old advertisements, public-service films, and broadcast interludes — 198 videos, kept short on purpose, about two hours and fifty minutes from start to finish. The full set is 125 channels. Each one ships as its own list of YouTube video ids, titles, and durations.

1988 is the year on the glass. The programmes come from many years, and every one of them plays through YouTube. The app never downloads, rehosts, or proxies the video.

The piece that makes it feel like a broadcast is a clock. The same channel, the same catalog, and the same UTC second always resolve to the same video and the same start time. Two people who turn the set on in different rooms are watching the same programme, already underway. A catalog shorter than a day rotates its opening programme by the UTC date, so Tuesday is a different timetable from Monday. A catalog longer than a day plays straight through midnight. When a video ends, the clock chooses the next slot. YouTube's up-next row never gets a vote.

The YouTube player is real, and its controls are hidden. Scanlines, grain, and a vignette are a CSS layer on top of the iframe. A CSS filter on the iframe itself fights the player, so the glass treatment stays on a separate layer and ignores pointer events. Changing channel runs a short analog zap: snow, a horizontal tear, and the new picture already loading underneath. prefers-reduced-motion keeps still scanlines and replaces the zap with a brief dark frame. Volume lives on the glass, in steps of five. The channel and volume HUD fades after a few seconds of quiet. The first tap, arrow, or OK press only wakes it.

A phone can be the remote. The computer shows a QR code and an eight-character code. The phone joins over a WebSocket and can send power, channel, volume, and mute. The desktop answers with its real state, including changes made on the glass. Picture and sound stay on the computer. One phone pairs with each set. An invite lasts five minutes and is used up on the first join. A disconnected desktop has two minutes to return. A session lasts twelve hours. Presses made while the phone is offline are dropped. A remote that replays a stale command after it reconnects is a worse remote than one that missed a press.

The app is Vue 3, Vite, Pinia, and Vue Router. One Pinia store owns power, channel, volume, interruption, and the current slot. Components draw the set. They do not call YouTube.

A shared clock is the product. Computing { videoId, startSeconds } from UTC is what makes two browsers agree. A random pick per session would be a website with a bezel.

Search quota ends a demo. YouTube's Data API allows very few search.list calls per day. videos.list is cheap by comparison. Viewers no longer search. Each channel is a JSON file, lazy-loaded only when that station is tuned. The home page, the guide, and the phone never download those lists. Playback works with no API key. When a key is present, it only re-checks that the bundled ids are still embeddable and still have a duration.

Embeddable is a moment, not a promise. Public playlists contain private, deleted, regional, and non-embeddable videos. A catalog that played on Saturday can fail on Sunday. That channel shows an interruption card and retries. Another station is never quietly substituted. If Cricket cannot play, the set does not put on Nature and hope you will not notice.

The power button is the browser gesture and the legal gate. Sound will not start without a click. That same click is where the viewer agrees to the privacy policy, the terms, and YouTube's terms. The Data API and the iframe stay idle until then.

Nostalgia needs a boundary. I wanted the feeling of that era of Indian television. I did not put an official broadcaster mark on the glass. The site says so in the footer.

Demo

The set is live at https://1988.in/.

Choose Watch TV and turn the set on. You should arrive in the middle of a programme, with the YouTube controls gone.
Press CH + or the right arrow. Snow, then a different station, also already in progress.
Open Channels. Search "cricket", or filter by the DD Era tag, and tune in.
On the computer, choose Connect remote. Scan the QR code, or open /remote and type the eight-character code. Change the channel from the phone. The desktop moves. The phone never shows the video.

Source: github.com/tusharv/positive-player

Partner Technologies

The two platforms this project actually depends on, beyond the Vue app, are the YouTube Data API through Google Cloud, and Vercel.

YouTube Data API on Google Cloud

Playback is the IFrame Player API. That part spends no Data API quota. Catalogs are the expensive problem.

The first lineup was search queries, one per channel. Flipping through the set could burn the daily Search Queries budget, which is a separate, much smaller bucket than the general 10,000-unit pool. I moved every station to a curated bundle. A generator script runs only when I ask it to, never as part of npm run build. It checks metadata, keeps up to 50 videos for a generated channel, preserves hand-picked selections, and refuses to replace the files if any generated channel would be left with fewer than three videos. A changed bundle gets a new cache key, so a viewer's browser does not keep yesterday's list under today's name.

Two stations are hand-kept. Channel 005, DD Classics, is a 34-day rotation of serials, comedy, culture, and vintage ads. Channel 013, Vintage India, keeps the short ad spots that a "drop anything under 60 seconds" rule would have thrown away. Curated items shorter than one second are still dropped. Ordinary catalogs still drop anything under a minute.

Vercel

The television is a static build. The remote needs a public WebSocket, and a static host does not provide one.

vercel.json rewrites /remote-ws to a Function, api/remote-ws.mjs, with maxDuration set to 300 seconds. The function includes the server code, the shared protocol module, and the channel data. The hub checks channel numbers against the real lineup, so a phone cannot tune to a station that does not exist.

The function holds an in-memory session hub. The desktop creates a session and receives an id, a host token, the eight-character code, and an invite. The phone joins with the code or the invite and receives a remote token. From then on the phone sends commands (channelStep, volumeStep, digit, mute, powerOff, powerToggle) and the desktop sends state. The host is authoritative. The phone cannot write the channel except by a command the TV applies through the same store as a key on the glass. The socket's origin has to match the request host. Idle connections are swept.

The ceiling is honest. Sessions live in that one process, up to 1,000 televisions, and they disappear when the process does. Two instances cannot share one paired phone and TV. For a room of sets, that is the right shape. A remote that has to survive many instances needs shared session storage and a way to deliver a command to the process that still holds the desktop socket. Video never passes through the function. The bytes go from YouTube to the browser.

Locally, the same hub runs in Node and Vite proxies /remote-ws to it. One protocol module, two places it can run. A self-hosted box can also serve the built site and the socket from a single Node process.

Hackathon Experience

The moment from the software that I keep is a small one. Two browsers, one channel, the same second of the same video, with no server choosing the schedule. That was the first time it felt like a television.

Feel 1988. No skip. 📺

Tushar — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 04:30:00 +0000

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Weekend Challenge: Build for a Friend

What I Built

I built https://1988.in/ for my kids.

1988.in is a television that lives in the browser. You accept a short station notice, press the glass, and the set comes on already in the middle of a programme. Bollywood is on 001. Cricket is on 002. Jungle Book, Shaktimaan, and the other Doordarshan-era shows are in the guide under DD Era, next to nature, food, sport, and quieter channels you can leave running. Nobody picks “what to watch next.” The channel is simply on.

That is the problem it solves. Streaming apps ask for an account, a search, and a decision. A television asks you to sit down. Channel, volume, and mute stay in that browser, including changes made from a paired phone. Turn the set on again and you are back on the same channel, mid-broadcast.

When I handed it over, they said: “Interesting”

Demo

https://1988.in/

On a laptop, open the TV, accept the notice, and press power. Open Channels and search “Ramayan” or the DD Era tag. On a phone on the same page, choose Connect remote, scan the QR code, and change the channel. The picture stays on the computer. The phone only sends the button press.

Code

https://github.com/tusharv/positive-player

The lineup is src/data/channels.ts. The broadcast clock is src/lib/broadcastClock.ts. The television state lives in one Pinia store, src/stores/tv.ts. The phone speaks a small WebSocket protocol. Video bytes go straight to YouTube.

How I Built It

The set is a Vue 3 single-page app: Vite, Pinia, Vue Router. YouTube’s IFrame Player paints the picture. YouTube Data API v3 fills the guide from each channel’s public uploads playlist. A Vercel function at /remote-ws relays the phone. The same relay runs as a small Node process for local development and self-hosting.

Each channel is a playlist id, not a search. A default YouTube project allows 100 search calls a day, which a hundred-channel lineup would burn in one flip-through. Playlist and video lookups sit in the ordinary quota, and a catalog younger than seven days stays in the browser.

The illusion of a broadcast is a clock. Durations in the catalog are summed into a loop. The UTC second, modulo that loop, picks the video and how many seconds into it you join. Two people who turn on the same channel in the same second join the same moment. When a video ends or will not embed, that id is dropped for the rest of the tab and the clock runs again.

The phone never touches YouTube. The TV shows a QR code and an eight-character pairing code. One phone pairs to one set. The desktop sends its real state back, so a channel change on the glass shows up on the phone, and a channel change on the phone shows up on the glass. Sessions live in memory, invitations expire, and a disconnect gives the desktop two minutes to return.

I built it with Cursor, from a written spec through to the Samsung TV fix in 0.4.1. On those sets, YouTube draws on a separate hardware plane, so a full-screen scanline layer hides the picture while the sound keeps playing. The player detects that and turns the glass effects off. That was a coding agent helping me write a website. The running programme does not call a model.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

The part a family actually touches is open because it is a web page.

There is no account on 1988.in. Power, channel, and volume stay in the browser that is sitting in the room. The remote is another browser tab. Pairing credentials stay in that tab. A closed streaming app would have put the lineup, the history, and the remote behind a login on someone else’s server. Here the lineup is a file in the repository. The schedule is arithmetic on UTC, so there is no programme database to run, pay for, or lose. Video stays on YouTube, which is the closed piece, and the television around it can be read, changed, and self-hosted.

What that made possible is a set you can leave on for someone who does not want another app. They press the glass. Something is already playing. They pass the phone across the sofa.

My Agent Session

The design spec and the implementation notes are in the repository under docs/superpowers/ and docs/architecture.md.