Cathodique Blog

I have just sent the following email to all Cathodique customers.

Dear Cathodique customer,

As you might already know, Cathodique (YouTube player for Mac) stopped working due to changes on YouTube side. The first time this happened, we quickly updated the program to make it work. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t provide H.264 videos via their API, so we had to reverse-engineer changes to their website to get videos, emulating browser behavior. This process required a lot of energy and effort, which we could use to write more useful software instead of rushing to reverse-engineer the website every time there’s a change on YouTube.

That’s why we stopped developing Cathodique, and will be focusing on other projects. But there’s good news too: we arranged a deal with Flavio Tordini, creator of Minitube: he was kind enough to offer every paid Cathodique customer a Minitube license for free.

Basically, Minitube is Cathodique with many more features. Not only you won’t be left without standalone YouTube player, you’ll get a better player. [… information on how to receive license …].

You can download the program from Minitube website.

Thank you for being our customer!

Best regards,
Dmitry Chestnykh
Coding Robots

Even if you haven’t tried Cathodique, I encourage you to take a look at Minitube, an awesome YouTube player for Mac, Linux, and soon Windows.

I want to thank Flavio for this opportunity.

YouTube changed the way they deliver non-flash videos, and today Cathodique and other YouTube-related programs failed to load them. We fixed this issue in 1.3. If the automatic updater didn’t pick it up, click Cathodique > Check for Updates….

For now, we forced SD for all videos until we figure out how to load HD. Then we’ll post an updated version.

New version of Cathodique, our standalone YouTube video player for Mac, is a bug-fix release:

• Fixed “Cannot open video” for some videos.
• Fixed crash when pressing some keys when video player was in focus.

If you have a copy of Cathodique, just open it and click Cathodique > Check for Updates... to install the new version. If you’re a new user, you can download the program from its product page.

The shiny new version of Cathodique is available! This release brings more features, removes clutter, and fixes bugs.

Here are the highlights:

Video formats popup

Instead of the “HD” button there’s a new popup that allows you to select SD, HD 720p or HD 1080p as preferred video format.

Sharing

Now you can quickly send a link to video to your friends and followers without copying and pasting it. With the new Share menu you can share video by email, in Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader (including Google Buzz if your Reader and Buzz are connected).

Bookmarklet

Do you want an easy way to open videos in Cathodique from your web browser? Just put the bookmarklet into your browser’s bookmarks bar (click Cathodique > Install Bookmarklet or go to this page).

When you’re on YouTube, click the bookmarklet to open video in Cathodique. This also works with any page that has embedded video from YouTube (and if there’s no video, it will search for selected text).

It works with any modern browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc).

Alternatively, you can drag and drop a link to YouTube video into the Dock icon to open it.

Recent Searches

Cathodique now saves your recent searches (and, of course, there’s a way to clear them).

To make user interface less cluttered, we’ve removed “Toggle Search Results” button. The feature is still there and is accessible via View > Toggle Search Results menu or using a keyboard shortcut (⌘B). We ♥ minimalism!

Download Cathodique 1.1 now (or click Cathodique > Check for Updates to install the new version using the built-in updater. ).

We are happy to announce the release of our new Mac product, Cathodique!

Cathodique is a simple standalone player for YouTube videos. Just type in a few words into a search box and press Return to quickly receive search results in an uncluttered sidebar as thumbnails (with clip title, rating, and duration), and double-click the video you want to watch.

Cathodique is based on QuickTime framework, so it uses less CPU power than Flash. It also allows you to view videos in full screen mode (with translucent, floating controls).

Try it out now!

(Requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.)