Now… Something more unorthodox. A TUI browser for LBRY! – Meet FastLBRY

by | Apr 6, 2022 | Community Projects, Community Updates and Other Posts

While chatting in the LBRY-Community Revolt server we stumbled across a message mentioning “FastLBRY”, something that has not come up in conversation, so naturally, we were curious. Upon further research, we found the NotABug repositories for FastLBRY-terminal, which is just one key component of the FastLBRY family of utilities. 
If you’re anything like us, you probably also just went “Huh, now this does sound interesting!” and you’d be right to do so. Upon first glance, the TUI is just… appealing. It catches your eye in the same way that an old 02’ IRC client would.
Of course, looks aren’t everything. Let’s talk about functionality. The absolute simplicity of navigating around FLBRY (I know, I know, it’s a funny abbreviation.) is what makes it just that much more appealing. 

To get started, you just type “connect”. This will check your wallet data, get you synchronised with the wallet servers, and get you… well… connected to the LBRY network.

Afterwards, you can use common commands like “search”, “open”, “save”, “help” and more, to find the content you are looking for, download it, and find help.

 

Here, we tried a search for “@LBRYCommunity”, and whaddaya know… There we are!

Selecting our channel now shows all the lovely details about it.

Channel data is cool for nerds and all, but what about the average Joe who just wants to watch some cat videos? You can do that too! However, there is a small caveat. Rather than opening the content within your native content viewer (vlc, feh, etc.) the content is forced to open in your web browser, redirecting to (of all things) SPEE.CH! There is a quick redirect to what seems to be a self-hosted instance of spee.ch or something similar, which gets the job done, but we figured it was worth a mention. The alternative would be using the “save” command to download the content to your local system, then opening the file with your preferred application.

Backtracking a bit to the nerdy data bits, when you are going to open a bit of content, be it a video, image or otherwise, you’re met with plenty of well-formatted, easy to read data including;

  • LBRY URL
  • Title
  • Tags
  • License
  • File Type / Value Type
  • File Size
  • Duration (If applicable)
  • LBC Information at: Time of Upload, Support Values, and Combined Total

Overall, this open-source utility is quite useful for those wanting to run a minimal LBRY desktop experience. We found it to be a bit buggy at times, but that’s to be expected with a one-man Python Passion Project (Try saying that five times fast!) and the data that this utility provides is more than adequate for those power users looking to see LBRY working away under the hood, so to speak. 

If you are interested in trying this out for yourself, you can find all of the installation instructions, documentation and code base over on the NotABug repository.
The creator of FLBRY also has their own LBRY channel as well. (lbry:///@blenderdumbass:f)

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