Hi Product Hunt community! 👋

I'm Katsuhiko, the creator of Ambient Media Player. I'm thrilled to introduce our major milestone update — Ambient v2.6.5!

What is Ambient?

Like many of you, I love having background music or video playing while I work. But managing local music files (like ripped CDs) and YouTube videos in separate players was always clunky and frustrating.

Ambient solves this by being a hybrid, browser-based media player. It leverages the YouTube IFrame Player API and HTML5 media tags, allowing you to create custom JSON playlists where YouTube videos and your local PC files live and play together seamlessly. No switching apps, no interruptions.

What’s New in the v2.x series (v2.6.5)?

Since the v1.x series, Ambient has evolved into a much more robust, polished, and developer-friendly player. Here are the key highlights of the major leap forward:

✨ Enhanced Performance & Reliability: Completely rebuilt core logic for smoother transitions between YouTube streams and local media assets.

🎨 Refined UI/UX: A cleaner, distraction-free interface built with modern CSS/JS integrations, optimized for keeping your focus on work.

⚙️ Advanced Playlist Options: More powerful control over your JSON playlists (v2 schema compatible), including fine-tuned volume levels per track, custom fade-ins/fade-outs, seek timing, and full-screen toggles.

🌐 Better Environment Support: Smooth execution on modern PHP environments (PHP 8.2+) and fully optimized for local deployments (XAMPP, MAMP, Docker, etc.).

How to get started:

1. Clone the repo: `git clone https://github.com/ka215/ambient.git`

2. Drop it in your local document root (Apache/Nginx with PHP).

3. Customize your `PlayList.json` with your favorite YouTube IDs and local paths.

Or try out the online cloud version (YouTube-only demo) right away!

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any features you'd like to see next. Thank you for your support! 🚀