BendyStraw (Android App)

If you don’t already know, NewPipe is a privacy-friendly, ad-free Android app for accessing YouTube. It’s a great piece of software and I use it all the time.

NewPipe works without an account. You can subscribe to channels, save playlists and do other useful things, but everything is saved locally on your device (and I love that it works like this).

I use NewPipe on several Android devices. Over time I’ve ended up with different playlists and subscriptions on each device, and sometimes I can’t be sure which device I need to use to find a certain song or video. To help with this I made BendyStraw.

• Expanded playlist
• Collapsed lists
• Export streams to text
• Copy entire playlist
• Copy streams from playlist

BendyStraw imports NewPipeData-*.zip files and lets you:

• Open multiple zips at the same time, so you can combine data from several devices
• Delete Copy Move Rename your custom playlists
• Delete Copy Move streams from one playlist to another
• Delete Copy Move channel subscriptions between databases
• Delete Copy Move remote (bookmarked) playlists
• Re-order playlists, sorting the streams by Title, Channel or Length (just tap the column headings in the tables)
• Streams (audio/video) can be opened directly from BendyStraw, as the URLs are clickable
  • If you set video links (in your Android settings) to open in NewPipe you can make a split-screen view and jump around your playlists
• Export playlist as raw text, for example to be used with yt-dlp
• Dark/light themes

After editing simply export a new zip file, then import it back into NewPipe.

Installation

F-Droid

Search for ‘bendystraw’ (all one word) in the F-Droid app, or find it at https://f-droid.org/en/packages/rocks.mm_dev.BendyStraw/.

Direct download

The apks are also directly available on the Codeberg releases page.

JSON Playlist Import

BendyStraw can import playlists from a JSON file. This is a new and basic feature which has some requirements and limitations.

Show the JSON Import Button

The button is hidden by default

• Go to the preferences screen (hamburger menu in top-right corner)
• Tick the ‘Show JSON Import Button’ box
• Open at least 1 database
  The button only shows when there is a database open, as it imports the JSON into the currently-opened database

Limitations

We assume that all playlist entries are YouTube streams.
Although NewPipe is able to handle streams from other services too, for now this import feature is just for YouTube

The JSON import format has been designed to prefer simplicity over richness of data. This comes with some pros and cons:

• Several stream attributes (eg ‘uploader URL’, ‘duration’, ‘upload date’, ‘view count’, ’thumbnail’) are omitted initially
• After import into NewPipe, before the playlist has been played, the above details (attributes) will be missing (so eg the thumbnail will just be a grey blank)
• The first time each stream is started, NewPipe will grab the missing details for the stream and fill in the database

Requirements

JSON playlists will be imported into whichever database is currently open in BendyStraw.

The general (pseudocode) schema is:

{
  "PLAYLIST_NAME": [ARRAY_OF_STREAMS],
  "PLAYLIST_NAME": [ARRAY_OF_STREAMS],
  etc...
}

PLAYLIST_NAME

• Is expected to be unique (if it isn’t, identically-named lists will be combined into 1 playlist)
• If a playlist with exactly the same name already exists in the target database, entries from the JSON will be appended to that existing database

ARRAY_OF_STREAMS

Each stream must be an object with named properties as follows:

I use comments in this explanation but remember comments are not valid JSON — do not include comments in your JSON

{
  // These are required
  "stream_type": "VIDEO_STREAM", // or 'AUDIO_STREAM'
  "title": "Seasonal Affective Disorder",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RJ5GftYT2c",
  "uploader": "Hidden Valley Bushcraft", // Uploader/channel name,

  // These below are optional. NewPipe will update them when the stream is loaded, so they only have meaning on first import before the playlist has been played.
  // It's probably better to omit them but they are allowed if you want to use them.
  "uploader_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7BPYlL4f5j5R1Y7HUgeVg", // Uploader/channel URL 
  "duration": "120", // Length of stream in seconds 
  "view_count": "1273621", // Number of times the stream has been viewed on YouTube --- simple number ie no commas, abbreviations etc 
}

Complete Example JSON

Below is some complete sample JSON. If this was imported into a database in BendyStraw it would do one of the following:

• Create 2 new playlists (“Tech Things” and “Good Songs”)
• Or (if playlists with those names already existed) then the streams would be appended to those existing playlists

{
  "Tech Things": [
    {
        "stream_type": "VIDEO_STREAM",
        "title": "Free software, free society: Richard Stallman at TEDxGeneva 2014",
        "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM",
        "uploader": "TEDx Talks",
        "uploader_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsT0YIqwnpJCM-mx7-gSA4Q"
    },
    {
      "stream_type": "VIDEO_STREAM",
      "title": "Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Full Documentary) | Future Cities",
      "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY",
      "uploader": "Wired UK",
      "uploader_url": "https://www.youtube.com/@wireduk"
    }
  ],
  "Good Songs": [
    {
        "stream_type": "VIDEO_STREAM",
        "title": "Aztec Camera - Somewhere In My Heart (Official Music Video)",
        "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w1Q8ZkXZ1Q",
        "uploader": "RHINO",
        "uploader_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWEtnEiVwUy7mwFeshyAWLA"
    },
    {
        "stream_type": "VIDEO_STREAM",
        "title": "Imagine Dragons - Thunder",
        "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKopy74weus",
        "uploader": "ImagineDragonsVEVO",
        "uploader_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpx_k19S2vUutWUUM9qmXEg"
    },
    {
        "stream_type": "VIDEO_STREAM",
        "title": "𝑰𝒕'𝒔 𝑨 𝑯𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒂𝒄𝒉𝒆 -Bonnie Tyler (Cover by Yhuan) #gutomversion #hitback #goodvibestambayan #yhuan",
        "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQCm7VWyg-U",
        "uploader": "Yhuan Official",
        "uploader_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDxVjSFhfiPGispcK9o0qzw"
    }
  ]
}