NewPipe. Newpipe is feature rich and does not require an account. It holds all subscriptiouns localy and does not use the API. Customizable and had tons of features.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Libretube is better as for me
Also a grat option! To each his own.
For desktop: Piped or Invidious instances, like piped.kavin.rocks
If you want to completely get rid of YouTube, then PeerTube or Odysee is nice.
Since we're on Lemmy, which uses ActivityPub, I'd first recommend using PeerTube since it's also a fediverse ActivityPub platform. But it's pretty small right now.
Alternatively, Odysee has an established creator base and it's easy for YouTubers to sync video uploads, so it has a real chance at becoming mainstream if we can push adoption outside of the tech-sphere.
In terms of just YouTube privacy-respecting frontends, with your browser I recommend using Piped or Invidious.
For more instances for privacy-respecting front-ends, this link is a good resource. Furthermore, you could consider installing the LibRedirect extension to automatically redirect you to privacy-respecting frontends.
On Android, I strongly recommend downloading LibreTube or NewPipe from the F-Droid store. LibreTube is actually really pretty, so I prefer it to ReVanced on that basis as it doesn't require any level of login to manage a subscription list I think. Newpipe is already very well established and I use it personally, very good app.
Happy to answer any questions, but I'm not an engineer, I'm just a guy :p
These are all great suggestions and I just want to throw one more out there. There is also FreeTube which is a private YouTube front-end desktop client which is pretty good.
I'll occasionally run into an issue where it won't remember my place in a longer video if I leave and come back, so your experience may vary depending on the type of content you consume. But otherwise it's great.
Peertube is simply not good however. I encourage people to try it but it's just not even remotely close to YouTube content.
For now I think Newpipe is a much, much better choice.
I think Lemmy is good enough to replace Reddit though, which is why I'm here so much. :)
I agree that it's not fully "there" yet, but it won't get "there" without users engaging with the videos. I try to use PeerTube for any YouTube creator I enjoy that uploads there. For example, Linux Experiment has started uploading there so I'll be tuning in weekly to see his news updates.
Let's still support upcoming platforms where we can :)
On desktop there's Freetube, which is an accountless youtube frontend, which I've basically been daily driving for over a year now. It's not the best experience in the world, as it still lacks some features like playlists.
Newpipe is an open source youtube client, unfortunatly it's missing any features that require an account.
If you want those features check out Revanced, a patched youtube app. Unfortunetly since Revanced uses the stock youtube app its not fully open source.
If you decide to use revanced be careful as there are a lot of fake websites. The real one is revanced.app or the github. You also need to patch the app yourself.
I confirm this is the greatest front end out there (excluding YouTube front end)
I'm Elon Musk
Revanced on android has been good for me lately
Revanced is amazing and does what it says it does. +1 from me too.
Also this. Apparently revanced also works on the reddit app.
Edit: I don’t ever use it on mobile. Desktop via Firefox only.
An Invidious instance or mpv (with yt-fzf for example).
Personally, I use yt-fzf for searching (no thumbnails though) and newsboat (a cli rss reader) for subscribing to YouTube channels then I can load up videos from there to mpv. I just press the "o" key on my keyboard when a new video comes out and it plays on mpv.
newpipe on android is a way to view youtube, invidious on desktop, i dunno about ios, peertube is the federated alternative to youtube but it's gonna be a bit before it gets good.
I personally self host my own Viewtube using docker and it works really well.
Since you seem knowledgeable, I have a marginally related question. Do you know any dockers that can scrape a YouTube playlist automatically and put it in a Plex folder?
Yt-dlp app can download playlists and whole channels also batch download supported, just set download to folder you need, from text file in which your channels/playlists listed, and add recurring cron job to repeat downloading new videos as they appear
Hm, I'll have to try again with that. I tried a couple, but I think that one would download one or two videos then quit.
Appreciate the info!
I had the same problem, to work properly app need to set proper arguments like "yt-dlp -abcd" and some people had problem with downloading speed, this problem was solved with usage of custom downloader option of yt-dlp, as custom downloader aria2 app was used with options to split downloaded file into 16 chunks downloaded in parallel, also as channels change names of videos you can accidentally download same file multiple times, to avoid that use dedication like fdupes or something, imo you should delve deeper into it and slap some bash script for your personal needs), then recurring cron job to repeat that script when you need it
Well since I did none of that, that would explain why it didn't work. Thanks again!
That looks amazing, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
How was setting this up? This looks great but I am often bad at this.
Assuming you already have docker and docker compose set up on your server I just followed the docker compose file section on their installation wiki
Because YouTube videos keep getting deleted I download all my favorites and host on my Jellyfin server.
Same! So much better this way. I wrote my own program so it just automatically downloads new videos from channels I've told it I'm interested in, and then it puts it in the appropriate Jellyfin folder. Way more reliable this way, I don't miss videos. And I don't care if my internet shits the bed, it can take however long it wants to take to download and once it's there I can even watch it even with no internet. I even implemented sponsorblock in it so Jellyfin automatically skips sponsored segments.
On desktop, first try VLC Media Player. It's very good for streams and videos on both YouTube and Twitch. Failing that, mpv is also very good.
If you'd just prefer a website, have a look at Piped. Invidious and CloudTube are also good, but they can be a bit hit-and-miss with which videos they can play, in my experience; and Invidious is also currently being attacked by Google's lawyers.
I've been alternating between using Invidious and Piped in the past week or so, which are both open-source ways to access Youtube videos.
Piped seems to be more consistent with fetching captions, so I'm leaning towards that. You can setup an addon like LibRedirect to change any YouTube URLs to whatever instance of Piped or Invidious (and a couple others I haven't checked out).
LibreTube is what I've been using on Android since Youtube Vanced died.
in what way is watching YouTube on an open source web browser not open enough?
What are you hoping to achieve here? If you just dont want the tracking then I've found Firefox containers and the CookieAutoDelete extensions to be excellent. Contain YouTube to its own container that no other site uses and as soon as the tab closes all the cookies are deleted too. Enable all the strict privacy controls in FF too.
Peertube, Odysee, and YouTube via Newpipe or another client/proxy are my first suggestions. I also enjoy some content from Nebula on occasion.
Take a look at Odysee. I even have a browser extention that redirects me from youtube to the video on Odysee if it is avilable their.
Looks very clean. But the issue to me and with a lot of new social media sites is the lack of population and thus the lack of content. I'll try to stick to Lemmy and give it a chance but yeah it is a huge barrier of entry for new competitors.
Just use the addon so when there is a video on YouTube also available on Odysee it will automatically switch to Odysee.
The platform makes it very easy for creators to simply duplicate their YouTube channel.
And lastly, how are we ever going to get an alternative to YouTube if people refuse to use the alternative.
undefined> the lack of content.
I have the same issue. That is why i still use youtube for example but the extention allows me to slowly migrate to odysee. If the creator also uploads their videos to Odysee without me knowing the extention will make me aware of it by redirecting me to the Odysee variant of the video instead of youtube.
What's the extension?
I'm not the person you asked, but I did find this firefox add-on. I just installed it, but haven't really used it yet.