Holodex is fan-made platform that consolidates Vtuber content on YouTube. It’s best feature is a highly configurable multiview which lets you arrange and view multiple streams. I feel like rambling about it because it brings so much convenience to my viewing experience.
Inconvenient YouTube Feed
When I want to see what Hololive streams are happening on a given day, my best option on YouTube is to go to my Subscriptions tab. This page will show me live, recent, and upcoming streams. Live streams are always at the top, but recent and upcoming streams get mixed in with normal videos from my subscriptions. The arrangement of videos by the YouTube algorithm makes it difficult—sometimes disorienting, even—to figure out the schedule of upcoming Holo streams.
I’m sure this has to do with whatever YouTube is doing to maximize how many videos you watch and how many ads they serve you. That’s too big of a topic to get into here. The point is that it’s inconvenient to really see live, recent, and upcoming streams all in one place.
Now Holodex is my Best Friend
On the Holodex home page, by default the feed shows live and upcoming streams sorted by latest.
These 2 things alone is everything I wanted out of YouTube. But, oh! There’s so much more.
If you favorite your oshi(s), the Favorites tab will filter the feed even further, and there’s additional options beyond that:
- Sort by latest or most viewers
- Ignore certain topics
- Hide collab, placeholder, or missing streams
Despite the name, Holodex isn’t limited to Hololive either. You can have the main page populate with Hololive, Niji, Independent, or all Vtubers.
It has a much more robust search with fields including the organization, topic, Vtubers involved, and even title or description. And of course you can sort it several different ways too.
Multiview
The true magic of Holodex is the multiview. Navigate here and you’ll be greeted with a blank canvas and some hints.
Live streams are lined up at the top by descending duration. Add whichever streams you like and the multiview will be populated in auto layout mode. The button at the end of this list brings up a more comprehensive dialog for adding a live stream.
You can add more cells, interactively reorder them, and save custom layouts. Chat cells can be resized on the fly by toggling the Edit mode, but a given stream cell needs to be paused before you can adjust its edges or corners. In either case, everything snaps neatly and intelligently to the underlying grid.
Multiview is especially nice for collabs when you want to see multiple POVs. Holo’s recent obsession with Lethal Company is an excellent example of a scenario that Holodex really shines.
Media Controls
Play, pause, and control volume of individual streams, or use the parent controls to control them all, even muting all but 1 stream (very convenient!).
Tips
Video Quality
Depending on the number of concurrent streams you have up in multiview, consider selectively dropping the quality to save on bandwidth if that’s an issue. The size of a cell in a 2x2 grid in a browser at full screen on a 1080p monitor would already make text in a streamer’s game or overlay tough to read. So setting the quality to 720p could help. In the aforementioned layout, even 480p still feels sharp enough to see the VTuber’s avatar. Anything below that, however, starts to get into potato territory.
Chat Issues
If your chat cells are stuck in “Subscribers-Only Mode”, check out my post about fixing that. That solution was for Firefox, but the general idea should apply to any browser.
Still More to Explore
There’s also Musicdex which besides consolidating Vtuber music also provides radios as well as daily mix, community, and discovery playlists. These songs are all from YouTube, but are a mix of music videos and archived karaoke streams. The UI looks a lot like Spotify. I definitely need to check this out more and write about it separately.
There’s also a feature to sync archived streams, which I’d like to try for whatever upcoming collab stream I miss.
Enjoy!
I’d say using Holodex is a no-brainer for any Holo fan. You may prefer to only watch 1 stream at a time, but if you’ve got ADHD like me or severe FOMO, then check out Holodex for maximum sensory input.