Seems like Piped and Invidious are both on their last legs. Public instances on both services are pretty iffy, they go down fairly often now. Freetube works well on desktop but no real way to sync subscriptions and watch history to a phone. Self-hosting Piped/Invidious might be the solution but I don’t know if it’s worth the upkeep when YouTube is actively fighting against it.
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Stop using chrome! You cannot win using the browser provided by google. On Firefox adblock still works like a charm.
It doesn’t for me. Probably hasn’t been rolled out to you yet.
What adblock’s are you using?
uBlock Origin is the one that used to be relevant, but their anti-ad-blocking pop-up has made the site unusable for me lately.
I’m sure uBO will eventually work again but for now, no dice.
Ok, then I guess my location is not being targeted yet. uBlockOrigin with NoScript works well for me. There where a couple of slipups about a month ago, but hitting F5 would usually be enough.
Automatic daily downloads of all my favorite channels and watching them via jellyfin. Good enough for me
This is actually low key effin genius. Prevents having to log into a Google account on your TV.
That sounds cool. Does Jellyfin handle the downloading or is that something else?
Not too but there’s tubesync. It’s a selfhosted gui type thing for yt-dl or whatever.
TubeSync sounds like a good alternative for what I’m looking for. I’ve already got a Jellyfin server running so this will be perfect. Here’s a link for those interested TubeSync
Definitely the way to go, yt-dlp makes it so easy to automate too!
I found a smaller instance of Invidious whose been taken down and rolled over to a new IP within a couple hours. I’m feeling pretty safe where I’m at.
Long term I’d like to see PeerTube become a viable alternative but I don’t really see that happening.
I use NewPipe + SponsorBlock on Android, and I let Libredirect direct YouTube links to a working Piped instance. Sure, sometimes instances don’t work or go down, but I’ve not seen any signs that it’s on its “last legs.”
Some days are good and videos load just fine, but a majority of days no videos load even though the site is still up. I’ve experienced this on official instances and smaller instances. I mentioned last legs because of the recent breaking changes YouTube made, took some time for Piped devs to make a fix. Github Issue.
NewPipe has worked pretty reliably for me throughout all that. I did notice LibreTube required switching instances a lot more often (which is actually why I switched back to NewPipe).
Hopefully, they’ll be able to keep things working. If not, YouTube’s never been much more than a fun novelty to me, so I wouldn’t miss it too much.
On mobile Revanced On desktop Firefox with the appropriate addons
On TV smart tube.
I’m trying to setup an ADGUARD Add On through Home Assistant, but I’m having difficulties to set it up. Once I’m done all the local network will be Ad free, so it includes all the smart TVs and their apps
Hate to burst your bubble, but no you won’t. Unless you know something I don’t, adblockers don’t work on smart TVs. I’ve tried various apps, DNS blocking, even installed an adblocker on my router; still get ads on my TV. Drives me fucking nuts.
Eventually I gave up and just use SmartTube for YT, and Streamio for movies and TV. If I can’t block ads in apps, then I simply won’t use those apps. Unfortunately that doesn’t solve the problem of ads on the home screen, but it’s the best I can do.
No bubble burst. One cannot know everything. I hate wasting time in things that cannot be done. I’ll try to use smart Tube for YT on my smart TVs. Thanks for your feedback .
- Browser: I selfhost Piped
- Mobile: NewPipe works fine
- Subscriptions: I use RSS to subscribe to my favorite channels. No account required
mpv🤷 Don’t have to see ads anymore. The day I can’t watch it without seeing ads, is the day I stop using youtube.On the phone: NewPipe.
Everytime I open youtube, I struggle to find something to watch. Most of the videos I watch are linked to from third-party sites.
Didn’t know that mpv can do that. Will use that instead of browser.
It can play individual videos or playlists with the help of
yt-dlporyoutube-dl(I think the former is more active than the latter).
New pipe on the phone works pretty well. Better than YouTube ads. Although you can’t directly watch shorts without searching for them (as far as I know). I just watch those on Firefox with adblock.
Would recommend though.
To add on that: There is (an actively developed NewPipe fork)[https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe] that extends the functionality with SponsorBlock. LibreTube (another FLOSS app) also has this, Piped support and even DeArrow Support (vs cringe thumbnails.)
I use newpipe on android
I use the adminforge.de Piped instance and it works pretty much all the time
LibreTube on mobile, Piped on desktop. Works great for me.
As a archiver/data hoarder I use Tube Archivist that downloads videos from my subscriptions using sponsorblock to cut out ads. Then I use a script that tags the content and present them in Jellyfin with all info, sorted by channel and year.
This way I also have everything saved and no logging from YouTube of my viewing habits apart from what’s my subscriptions.
Not perfect, but close to it.
Dotfiles please
i have no configuration files prepared but it’s not rocket science at all. It consists of:
- https://www.tubearchivist.com/ running in docker
- https://jellyfin.org/ also in docker
- https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist-jf also in docker. Follow the guide to hook into the jellyfin install.
Sorry to not be able to provide YAML or alike. But it’s not hard to configure.
How do you script the addition of Metadata to the videos?
It’s automatically handled by https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist-jf.
It works by identifying the videos downloaded by Tube Archivist and sending the info to Jellyfin. It hooks into the API of Jellyfin and adds the metadata.
LibreTube has the most beautiful UI although it’s sometimes unstable. Latest releases have been a lot more stable and improving. Has integrated Sponsorblock. I like it more than other clients as they either have worse video quality if they don’t use Piped or just look bad, like the NewPipe client. Keep in mind that without an account, no matter what option you use to view, you will not be able to be part of a community. I like that I am kind of shut off, as I do not like the way the Algorithm keeps me from my favourite channels and feeds me shit, but this makes Youtube essentially just a video platform instead of a social media platform.
Selfhosted Piped instance. LibreTube with my instance on mobile, the piped web ui for the rest.
When you selfhost an instance, it works way better than any public one with many users.
Is there anything like LibreTube for iOS?
Yattee is probably the closest equivalent.
YouTube’s going down hill. I might not care soon
Yes, people should not be looking for ways to watch youtube secretly, but support alternative platforms that don’t censor and intimidate people?
I don’t think there’sal lot of alternatives for the moment. People go where there is content.
Self-host. Nothing they can do about that
They can block or throttle clients that don’t look like what they want. And often do.
They could also start requiring some click path or captcha etc that is hard to script. Or even login (registration is free!). And “DRM”.
Oh, they want a specific cookie/user-agent? We’ll get around that.
Let piped show the captcha to us, no problem.
Dynamic click paths are something I have no idea about, I’m no front-end developer haha.
I’ll either get off YT when they require logins, or I hope piped comes up with something that Vanced used to do.
I already have DRM seitched off in my browser (librewolf), hasn’t posed a problem yet. We’ll see.
