I used a public instance of Piped for a while and thought about selfhosting it, but the installation process was incredibly hard, to the point of being obnoxious, and in the end, it didn’t even work. I liked the features I saw on the public instances and would like to revisit it some time. Until there I’m using Viewtube. Installation was a breeze and it looks pretty nice.
Do you have some other YT frontend that we could try, post it here and tell us how easy/difficult it is to run and your opinion about it.
Firefox and ublock on desktop. Revanced on android.
This is nice but the dates are way off, like several weeks off.
Seems a better alternative frontend than invidious. I will check that. Thanks for sharing 🌞
I don’t see the point of having an alternative YouTube front end. I just run uBlock Origin with all the filters enabled. Who cares if Google sees your IP requesting a video, they already have it through various means lol.
Cool, still nice to have options.
I can’t speak as to why other people use their alternatives, but if you use
mpvwithyt-dlplike the guy above, and which I do – which isn’t really a full replacement for YouTube, just for part of it – then you can use stuff like deblocking, interpolating, deinterlacing filters, hardware decoding, etc. Lets me use my own keybindings to move around and such. Seeking happens instantly, without rebuffering time.Also means that your bandwidth isn’t a constraint on the resolution you use, since you aren’t streaming the content as you watch, though also means that you need to wait for the thing to download until you watch it.
There, one is talking about the difference between streaming and watching a local video, and that
mpvis a considerably more-powerful and better-performing video player than YouTube’s client is.I generally do it when I run into a long video or a series of videos that I know I’m going to want to probably watch.
EDIT: It also looks, from this test video, like YouTube’s web client doesn’t have functioning vsync on my system, so I get tearing, whereas
mpvdoes not have that issue. That being said, I’m using a new video card, and it’s possible that there’s a way to eliminate that in-browser, and it’s possible that someone else’s system may not run into that – I’m not using a compositor, which is somewhat unusual these days.
I’ve been using yt-dpl + MPV + qutebrowser or ytfzf for a long time, but lately I’ve been using Freetube a lot on my desktop (which can also use MPV as an external player). Subscriptions are saved locally and can be exported in several formats. I occasionally export them, sync them over syncthing to my phone and import it on my yt apps on my phone. On my phone I mainly use Libretube, with NewPipe as a backup.
Check out pipepipe, it’s a fork of newpipe with extra bug fixes. I’ve found it to be a lot more stable.
Those look nice. I don’t need a dedicated desktop client, since I always have Firefox open anyways, but I’ll give Libretube a try on my phone. Bonus, Libretube’s Mastodon account is on the same instance that I use :-)
