Spyke
selfhosted·Selfhostedbyasbestos

What’s the newest way of watching YouTube?

As it stands, both Piped and Invidious are dead. Because od that, I almost completely stopped watching youtube but l'd still sometimes like to check what the people I follow posted (I used to do that via Piped). Are there any new ways of following people without actually using Google? I'm aware of the tools that download new videos as they come out but I'm more interested in just "subscribing", kinda like RSS?
Ideally it would be on iOS

Edit: I found it, “Unwatched” on iOS is awesome, thanks to ![email protected]

View original on lemmy.world

I like that pipepipe provides an option to use a Google account fall back for videos that are age verified, since those don't work anymore without an account.

And they got a content filter update too so can block channels and keywords.

2
lemmy.zip

I just use Newpipe

However, Piped and Invidious are not dead. YouTube is trying really hard to kill them but they still work somewhat. It is a cat and mouse game.

40
Ulrichreply
feddit.org

They're effectively dead. I haven't ever found a single instance that works for more than a few days in years, despite people constantly recommending them.

2

Probably because people self-host them. I have an invidious instance self-hosted and use clipious on android to watch videos on it. Feels super modern and have pretty much no issues. Public instances usually don't work because of datacenter ips get blocked by YouTube.

3
sh.itjust.works

yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all <url> is the way. It turns playlist link into nicely named, curated video files awaiting to played by a regular video player

37

Does "all" remove every type of segment? Because that seems excessive for most people, there is a lot of filler/etc sections that are over-zealously tagged.

16

Possibly, but for how ad laiden YT has become it’s a path I’m willing to take.

8
asbestosreply
lemmy.world

Forgot about that one but it’s only on Android (mobile-wise)

8

Oh, I wasn't sure what platform you needed. For iOS, yeah I have no idea. For anyone else that comes across this though, Grayjay also has a desktop app now

7
sh.itjust.works

Grayjay started shitting the bed on me recently (Android via Samsung and Graphene, and on Desktop Linux/Windows) unless I disable vpn.

Even with Agent andDNS whitelisting for the apps.

A bit of a bummer after recently donating.

2
Ulrichreply
feddit.org

That's not GrayJay. That's YT. They've started blocking access to users who use a VPN without logging in.

God forbid they don't know everything about you.

Edit: response from FUTO

Seems to be related to UMP streams and we have issue opened for it and it's top priority for us to fix this now. It is however very complex so it takes time to fix it but at least we figured out why it is happening and once it is fixed it should be a smooth experience on Youtube at least for a while until they change something else on their backend...

4

Aye, that was my suspicion. Really awesome to be stripped of options for privacy so they can suck down that data.

Yt-dlp still works thankfully.

2
lemmy.zip

It doesn't allow for forking so it is effectively proprietary. It is critical that the community can fork something when they don't like the direction.

6
sopuli.xyz

I agree that's an important aspect of open source, but for me personally it's more about being able to audit what is running on my machine. the fact that they show you the code lets me see and confirm for myself that they aren't doing anything shady like spying. Though it might not be good enough for some people it definitely is for me.

It's a level of transparency you won't ever get from truly "proprietary" software.

13

My concern is that FUTO will start claiming that some other third party clients are stealing the code.

Be mindful that you don't look at the Grayjay code before contributing to something like Newpipe

4

It doesn't respect the 4 freedoms thus it isn't foss. Use it if you want but keep in mind that FUTO has full control over the rights of Grayjay.

-1

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I don't like that at all.

I use Tubular (Newpipe with Sponsorblock) from polymorphicshade, though lol.

Been a NewPipe user since the very first alpha

4

My only issue with Grayjay (both Android and Windows app), is you have to manually export the videos out of Grayjay

If you try to grab the files directly, they don't work.

4
Ulrichreply
feddit.org

That's a YouTube/VPN thing. Every other app is experiencing the same issue, in my experience.

3

I believe that YouTube supports RSS. I haven't used it in years, but gPodder allowed subscribing to channels.

Ah, yeah. From this post:

  • Go to the YouTube channel page.
  • Click more for the About box.
  • Scroll down to click Share channel. Choose Copy channel ID.
  • Get the feed from https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= plus that channel ID from the previous step.

From there, something (like a podcast client) needs to grab the video.

Otherwise, I've been using Tartube to download to my media server, which is not great but fine, except for needing to delete the lock file when it (or the computer) crashes, and the fact that the media server hasn't the foggiest idea of how to organize the "episodes."

15
sh.itjust.works

I was using freshrss which can grab the rad feed for a channel, but I’ve moved to tube archivist with a Jellyfin plugin. Now they are all predownloaded and just show up on my tv via Jellyfin app.

It’s a way better way to keep track of what you want to watch.

9
Konraddoreply
lemmy.world

Just curious if there's a setting in any of those applications that removes downloaded videos which have been watched at least once, and after x amount of time? It's sort of like a watch list. If watched, I don't want to keep the video. But if I do, I can add it to a playlist and let PinchFlat download it for archive.

2
Morareply
pawb.social

Deleting after x days is possible with Pinchflat, iirc.

2
lemmy.world

Addressing the subscribing part; I had similar requirements, so I started subscribing via FreshRSS while using a custom theme to give it a YouTube-like experience.

I shared the setup a few month ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21381606

Edit: One of the benefits of using selfhosted RSS with a web interface is that it is platform agnostic.

7

No worries! This setup ended up working better than I thought, and I've been using it as my primary way of interfacing with youtube.

2

Revanced and Firefox + uBlock Origin.

First one's hard to set up, but I'm sure anybody self-hosting literally anything could do it in two seconds.

7

I’m using News Explorer for my RSS feeds which also supports subscribing to YouTube channels. In the newer versions it even pulls the comments from YT.

6
lemm.ee

I am already paying for proton vpn for other reasons and connecting to other countries that don’t allow ads seems to work. It even works on NVIDIA media player and I might even assume Apple TV. I just lost my premium today so yeah

Edit. Just noticed this is a self hosted sub, I’ll just leave this in case someone needs the info but otherwise I’ll delete

4

Less developed countries who need their bandwidth more than you or countries at war... so not really a good idea after all.

1

i "subscribe" via rss in freshrss, just use the normal youtube.com on desktop and mobile browser. StoptheMadness on iOS to strip ads

4

I was going to recommend android apps until I saw iOS. I don't know anyones that let you keep a local subscription like newpipe does without needing to sideload. So if there are I'd be interested.

3

On my phone I still use LibreTube but with the option to load the video directly from YouTube (essentially doing what NewPipe is doing) and on PC I just use YouTube's directly. I still use Piped to keep my subscriptions synchronized tho.

3

On iOS, I uninstalled the app and use Brave for YT & if I need to get on Reddit.

3
Aku
lemm.ee

Anything work for iOS? I was using a side loaded app but it recently stopped working.

2

I’ve been running this for my whole family and friends for years at this point. Way better than any browser based solution.

2

piped.video still works for me: subscriptions, categories, comments. Watching is MPV

1