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Releases

• 2025-05-17

  Views, Views, Views

  Serial gets the largest update in its recorded history, most notably adding views – a new way to customize your feed.

  Hey all! This is by far the biggest update for Serial since they've been tracked.

  This update introduces views, a new way to customize your feed. Views allow you to combine a selection of filters (currently, time and categories) to create custom feeds for your Serial home page. This is the first step is finding ways to combat "content whiplash", or that feeling you get when you try to parse through the videos you watch to relax mixed into videos about current news or politics.

  Features

  • Adds views, a new way to organize your feeds
    • You can now add views in the sidebar
    • You can now edit views in the sidebar
    • You can now delete views in the sidebar
    • You can now reorganize views – by dragging – in the sidebar
  • Improves the experience of working with categories
    • You can now add categories in the sidebar
      • Assigning categories to feeds with recent activity can happen here
    • You can now edit categories in the sidebar
      • Assigning categories to feeds with recent activity can happen here
    • You can now delete categories in the sidebar
  • Improves the experience of working with feeds
    • Removes the dedicated feeds page
    • You can now edit feeds in the sidebar (#56)
      • Assigning categories now takes place here
    • You can now delete feeds in the sidebar (#56)
    • Feeds can now be searched through
    • Relvant feeds are now clearly denoted at the top of the list
  • Adds PeerTube support (#62)

  Improvements

  • Adds the ability to go to a video's YouTube page from the watch page (#55)
  • Adds an initial data fetching loader element
  • Moves manual date and visibility filters into dropdowns (to make room for views)
  • Improves the onboarding experience a touch

• 2025-04-18

  Quality of Life

  Serial gets a variety of UI/UX improvements and a way to send feedback both good and bad

  Improvements

  • UI items in left sidebar are now always visible, even when the list of categories is long
  • Adds "Report Issue" and "Share Idea" buttons to sidebar
  • More intelligently sets date filter when selecting sidebar items:
    • When selecting "All", sets the date to "Today"
    • When selecting a feed, sets the date to "This Month"
  • Adds nicer bottom sheet mobile UI for sidebar items with popup menus

• 2025-04-16

  Livelier Livestreams

  Serial now differentiates between standard videos and livestreams, offering better UI/UX for watching content live.

  Features

  • Adds better livestream support
    • Adds "Go Live" button that will bring you to the most recent part of a livestream
    • Adds "Live" indicator for when you are caught up to a livestream

  Improvements

  • Adds a button to toggle windowed fullscreen
    • Alternatively, toggle fullscreen with ` or f
  • Adds buttons to zoom in and out the active video
    • Alternatively, zoom in with + and out with -
    • Minor adjustments to zoom, adding one more zoom in step
  • Cleaner logic for custom video player
  • Better shortcut logic when on video page

• 2025-04-14

  Sidebar Sunday

  Serial's categories and feeds have moved to a brand new sidebar, making it easier than ever to filter your content

  Features

  • Adds the ability to filter by feed
  • Reworks the UI to move category and feed filters to a brand new sidebar, making it much easier to filter through videos and stay on top of many categories and feeds.

• 2025-04-12

  Hello, Open Source

  Serial no longer relies on an external auth provider, and is now open source!

  Features

  • Serial is now open source! You can check out the repository for more information.
  • Removes previous auth provider Clerk in exchange for auth solution Better Auth
    • If you run into issues with the migration, don't hesitate to reach out to the email at the bottom of the page!
  • Changed default video player to the serial player and added a number of nice-to-have shortcuts from YouTube, namely:
    • Seeking through the video with number keys
    • Play/pause with space
    • Slowing down the video with Shift + <
    • Speeding up the video with Shift + >

  Improvements

  • Now opens videos in fullscreen on mobile (as opposed to inline)
  • Added the ability to show and hide shortcuts on actions, such as on the "Watch Later" and "Unwatched" controls when viewing a video.
  • Many other small improvements and cleanups to get ready for open source.

• 2025-04-10

  Super Speed

  Serial now has lightning-fast bootup times thanks to local caching of feeds and videos.

  Features

  • Adds local caching for much quicker startup times
  • Re-introduces the ability to toggle forward and backward through the current selection of videos with the "[" and "]" keys
  • Added new experimental video player UI, accessible through the "Appearance" menu

  Bugfixes

  • Fixes an issue where feed items would dissapear (temporarily) after watching a video

  Improvements

  • Lots of behind-the-scenes data organization and cleanup

• 2025-03-16

  Imports & Shorts

  Serial now supports imports from users' two most popular feed formats: OPML and YouTube's subscriptions.csv.

  Notes

  This release brings the first support for bulk importing feeds into Serial! There is still more progress to be made (namely, in bringing in categories when importing) but this should be a great first step for many users.

  Features

  • Add support for importing subscriptions.csv files
    • This is the format provided by Google when exporting your subscriptions via Google Takeout.
  • Add support for importing OPML files
    • This is the most popular format used by RSS readers. If you follow YouTube channels in an RSS reader currently, this is likely the export format it provides.
  • Add experimental shorts filtering

• 2025-03-10

  Categories, Cookies, and Creativity

  After a long time away, Serial gets its first substantial contributions of the new year!

  Features

  • Add release notes (these very ones!)
    • Set up release note pages
    • Add notifier to let users know when new releases go out
  • Categories are here, for real!
    • Add and delete categories in the Feeds page
    • Filter videos with the category bar at the bottom of the page
      • Tip: The bottom categories will be grayed out if no videos match the selected filters. This should make it easy to stay on top of lots of categories!

  Improvements

  • Moved to a popover for theme editing and color mode selection as opposed to needing a fully separate page
  • Change embed URL from www.youtube.com to www.youtube-nocookie.com for better user privacy
  • Added refresh button to allow for fetching new videos without reloading the window
  • Clearer spacing and UI in feeds page
  • Data infrastructure simplification
  • General project maintenance

  Bugfixes

  • Fixed an issue where adding a feed by channel username would be flaky, resulting in one of the following:
    • An error adding feeds
    • Adding more than one feed