YouTube Panel

YouTube Panel

Watch YouTube videos in Obsidian's right sidebar while you take notes — with a queue and built-in search.

Features

Player

• Custom view in the right sidebar with a compact 16:9 player (privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com embed).
• URL bar pinned to the bottom of the panel — paste a link and press Enter (or hit Play).
• Handles watch?v=, youtu.be/, shorts/, live/, embed/, playlists (list=), timestamps (t=90, t=1h2m3s), and bare 11-character video ids.
• Remembers the last video — reopening the panel restores it (paused).

Queue

• Sits between the player and the URL bar; persists across restarts (stored in the plugin's data.json).
• Auto-advance: when a video ends, the next queued item plays automatically (via the YouTube iframe API's state messages).
• Items show real video titles, resolved through YouTube's oEmbed endpoint — no API key needed.
• Click an item to play it (the playing item is highlighted), hover for a remove button, Clear empties the queue.
• Add to the queue via:
  • the + Queue button next to the URL bar
  • right-clicking a line with a YouTube link in a note → Add to YouTube queue
  • the command Add YouTube link from selection or current line to queue
  • search (below)

Search

• The 🔍 button in the bottom bar or the "Search YouTube" command opens a native search modal.
• Results show title, channel, and duration ("live" for streams).
• Enter adds the selection to the queue; ⌘ Enter plays it immediately.
• No API key: it fetches the regular YouTube results page with Obsidian's requestUrl and parses the embedded ytInitialData JSON. The parser walks the JSON generically looking for videoRenderer objects, so it tolerates layout changes — but if YouTube restructures the page, search is the first thing that could break.

Commands

Development

npm install
npm run dev    # watch mode
npm run build  # one-off build

Install into a vault

Copy (or symlink) the plugin folder into:

<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-youtube-panel/

The vault needs manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css. Then enable YouTube Panel in Settings → Community plugins.

Network use

This plugin does not collect or transmit any user data, and has no telemetry. It connects to the network only to talk to YouTube (Google), and only when you play, queue, or search for a video:

• youtube-nocookie.com — the embedded player itself. Videos stream directly from YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed domain, which does not set tracking cookies. Google's privacy policy applies to playback.
• youtube.com/oembed — fetched once per queued video to resolve its title.
• youtube.com/results — fetched when you type in the search modal, to list matching videos.

Nothing else is contacted, and nothing from your vault is ever sent — only the video URLs/ids and search terms you explicitly enter.

Clipboard: the Play YouTube link from clipboard command reads the system clipboard, only at the moment you invoke it, to find a YouTube link. The plugin never writes to the clipboard, and clipboard content is never stored or transmitted.

Notes

• Desktop only (isDesktopOnly: true).
• Some videos disable embedding ("Watch on YouTube") — that's a per-video publisher setting the plugin can't bypass.
• Playing a video that isn't in the queue doesn't insert it; when it ends, the queue starts from its first item.