HermitTube - Follow your favorite Hermits through all the seasons!
13630 Videos
5925.2 Hours
12.4 Years
Watch several Hermits in one sitting, all in chronological order! See a build being built in the background in one video and it's completion from a different perspective in the next! See two Hermits and a chicken have a hilarious interaction with a third Hermit who's new to you? Easily check them out, follow, and subscribe!
This is an unofficial, fan-created and maintained site for HermitCraft. All content is owned by their respective publishers and/or Hermits. This site makes no claim on any content, revenue, or statements found in the linked media and is intended for personal entertainment purposes only.
It started from the frustration of not being able to easily watch HermitCraft videos in order across several channels. Without this site I would have to seek out if a Hermit has new content, figure out the viewing order across several channels, navigate to the intended video on my TV, then repeat this process for each video. Now the site solves all of that for me, I don't have to decide which Hermit I feel like watching because the next is always queued up! And if I want to just watch two hours of Hermits in order on my TV, I can do that!
Feel free to reach out to me on github, reddit, or email.
Background and Technical Bits
This site was primarily coded as a self-challenge over a holiday weekend. After playing with it for a few weeks, I decided I really liked watching HermitCraft here so this turned into my official COVID-19 hobby. I have a great day-job and several other responsibilities beyond watching YouTube, so when I have a few hours and/or a fun idea I'll try to add it to the site.
The site is in some ways a personal challenge at making a simple website without a framework and with as few requirements as possible. The only significant external code used is a database ORM and two Javascript libraries.
The site runs in a batch mode, regularly refreshing itself every few minutes. This makes traffic extremely cheap to host and therefore the site should scale very well. The backend runs on Python Flask while the frontend is very minimal custom Javascript.
The site is somewhat intended to be used by any creators for cross-channel content creation, see CubedTube for more info. There is almost nothing Hermit-specific in the code so it could be quickly adapted for another use-case. Let me know if this interests you and I would be thrilled to help get you set up!
FAQ
Hermits are missing - where is my favorite Hermit?
I grabbed all the playlists I could find for all seasons, but its possible I missed some. Ethos' videos were particularly challenging and I know I'm missing a lot of their videos. Biffa seems to have deleted their Season 5 and 6 playlists. I drew the line at manually curating playlists but I have incorporated fan-curated playlists (and the Hermits seem okay with this) so if you want to roll up your sleeves, let me know! All Hermits are precious.
Another option is to personally reach out and encourage the Hermits to use YouTube playlists as that REALLY helps with finding and indexing these videos.
Why focus on YouTube Playlists?
Because that seems to be where most videos are at. But I fully intend to support other mediums when and if it makes sense. Let me know on github if you have any suggestions.
Even within the YouTube garden, it can be very expensive (in fake YouTube-quota dollars) to find videos not linked through a playlist. The site supports directly listed videos if a playlist is not available, but its a very manual process.
Some videos are out of order, can this be fixed? Also there are videos in here which are not relevant to HermitCraft!
Video ordering can quickly get very complicated when you are aggregating across so many channels. In an attempt to not go insane, I simply look at the video published timestamp when ordering videos.
Some hermits publish non-HermitCraft videos on their HermitCraft playlists for their own reasons. It's their playlists and they are free to do so, but I don't feel that is constructive to the goals of this site and therefore I try to filter them out as I see them. Please let me know if you see any, though. Thanks!