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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

This is the best youtube client, bar none. It keeps local history and "subscriptions" without requiring you to log in to google. I use it on an Amazon Fire Tablet. There seems to be no iOS equivalent, which is one of the things preventing me from upgrading to an iPad.

Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV? I've tried it several times in the past, and its always been wonky there. I use SmartYouTubeTV (https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/) on AndroidTV right now, and the logged out experience is terrible.

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> This is the best youtube client, bar none. It keeps local history and "subscriptions" without requiring you to log in to google.

Isn't it funny how one man's feature is another man's bug?

Not supporting logging in with a Google account to keep subscriptions and history synchronized across devices is exactly what disqualifies it from consideration for me, and I suspect I'm not alone here.

For those like me there's YouTube Vanced, which is almost an exact clone of YouTube except without the ads, allows you to disable a bunch of distracting "features" like info cards and watermarks, and with the ability to use MicroG in place of Play Services for the actual logging in with Google feature: https://vanced.app/

Isn't it great that we both have the ability to choose the YouTube replacement app that works best for us despite Google technically "owning" the platform though? This is why I love Android. (EDIT: Re-read this and realized this could be seen as inflammatory. Really did not mean to start a platform war. Just glad that Android is a choice that's available to those who value this kind of thing.)

Piggybacking on my own comment, I'd love to hear if anyone has ideas on how to block Ads on a Chromecast...

YouTube Premium? Paying for YouTube is the best decision I've ever made when it comes to how much time and frustration I've saved per dollar.

Unfortunately, YouTube premium is not available in all countries, so some of us have have to go for more "hacky" solutions if we want to avoid ads.

You might want to consider setting up a Pi-Hole. Not sure how well those work with chromecasts though.

Pi hole cannot block ads inside of YouTube app, only on the web. I suppose that will be similar with Chromecast.

Youtube ads work in a way that domain blocking(pi-hole) cannot block them.

Chromecast uses Google DNS servers ignoring your DHCP DNS. You need to block Google DNS servers on your router so then the Chromecast will switch to your DHCP DNS.

Also, on my experience, some Youtube ads are served through the same domain that serves the video so you won't be completely ad free.

Cast from a local PC on the network. View from a browser with uBlock Origin. I forget that YouTube even has ads most of the time. Using another person's device is always a painful awakening.

More specifically stick to v14.21.54 of Vanced since otherwise you can see some ads now. I had updated to the latest one and started seeing ads below the video playing and when I am at the home page of my account.

Interesting. Are those ads benefiting the creators of the videos or are they ads that only make money for the creator of Vanced?

vanced is just the normal youtube app with just some modifications to block ads and background playback. It is closed sourced, not to mention, and uses a modified version of MicroG that works in unknown ways to access/sync with the google account, which is very different to the original MicroG (which has been developed to replace Google Services from your phone to minimize google tracking your activities.) . If you don't want unknown apps get access to your google account or if you care about your privacy/security, don't use Vanced, stick with NewPipe.

Yes the app itself is closed sourced, but FWIW their MicroG fork is not: https://github.com/YTVanced/VancedMicroG

Their stance on why they can't open source it sounds reasonable: https://github.com/YTVanced/VancedWebsite/issues/10

But I agree that if you have sensitive data on your google account you should make a value judgement yourself on if the extra convenience/features on Vanced is worth the risk over NewPipe.

I personally use a different mail provider so I don't have much sensitive information on my Google account, basically just using it for YouTube and Play Store.

Or create a Google account just for this purpose (YouTube).

Many people are trying to move away from Google and Youtube, the cross-device and cross-network tracking which this allows being deemed detrimental by more and more people.

There is also Bitchute and Hooktube, if you want to get at Youtube videos without using Google more than absolutely necessary.

Also it is worth mentioning that you can import your youtube subsciptions to newpipe. https://newpipe.schabi.org/FAQ/tutorials/import-export-data/

I prefer to use Vanced over the NewPipe. New Pipe somehow not always works properly and searching for videos is also not perfect.

But.

NewPipe allows downloading the videos which is great. Sharing video function in Vanced allows using NewPipe for download directly from Vanced application.

> Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV?

Yes I use newpipe on a Nvidia shield as my primary youtube client. There are at least 3 of us who open tickets as issues come up for Android TV.

It's not the most polished experience, but as of 0.19.5 it's functional. It rarely pulls videos above 1080p quality for some reason, but if I have to choose between 4k content on the youtube client and 1080p with my privacy, and without advertisements that's an easy choice for me to make.

Interesting. I installed it, and I have no problem getting 4K videos. Playback seems fine.

I can't figure out how to make it do a 10s skip forward / backward that you do on phone/tablet by tapping on the left or right side of the screen. I tried all the buttons on the shield's game controller after not being able to skip on my remote. I can change the focus to the timeline, and skip that way, but its not as nice as a 10s skip.

I think it's mostly the subscriptions I have/the content happens to be 1080p.

Skipping ahead/forward works out of the box on my harmony remote, long press on the <- or -> button.

I'm not sure what it would be on the default shield remote (mine is broken).

I've had it on my phone for some time, but 75% of the time it fails to play the video, complaining that it failed to parse the video page, or something similar. With youtube-dl, you have to keep it updated for it to not crash with similar errors, so might be a question of updates not being regular enough (I use F-Droid to update it).

Also, suggestion capabilities of Youtube are very high. I'll always be coming back for that until there is an alternative. Unfortunately, that also means that using non-official players is counterproductive (I want to feed the recommendation engine).

>but 75% of the time it fails to play the video

I would quibble with that. It's really all or nothing. Youtube changes something, NewPipe breaks entirely. Then NewPipe is updated, and it works perfectly again.

I like NewPipe, but in practice this means you just have to accept that there will be stretches, a few days or a week long, where it just doesn't work at all.

Actually, that's the funny thing. I noticed that I could find videos that work, while others didn't.

i think monotised videos die easier than non-monotised ones. leave it long enough and they all die.

Monetized* or monetised for those with a British bent.

Unless you're talking aboit videos that had stereo audio that have been converted to mono. (;

Yeah, F-Droid is kinda slow. You can fetch the apk directly from Github, though.

If you want to run your own Fdroid repository, it's quite simple to automate for releases from GitHub/gitlab apis. There's probably some way to automate it completely with GitHub actions even (I've been too lazy to learn to do it properly, so everything I do is just through local scripting on my computer, with netlify signing Fdroid releases for me).

Due to Fdroid being so slow at updating indexes on my older devices, I actually use a secondary Fdroid client (nethunter client also has a privileged extension) for manual updates, which only has my personal repos enabled.

Odd.

I know what you're talking about since I have experienced it before, but I have not encountered the problem often in the past year or so. Perhaps you were just using it during a dry spell from the NewPipe developers or F-Droid. A number of useful features have been added during the past year, such as the ability to view live streams. A few quirks also exist, such as feeds displaying videos that are posted in the future.

As for the recommendation engine, I prefer gaming it. NewPipe is wonderful because it does not feed it. I have a special profiles setup on my desktop for when I want to feed it. This approach works wonderfully for discovering new channels, allows for multiple profiles to get recommendations for different viewing interests, avoids polluting recommendations based upon a single odd-ball view, and allows finer grained control over the information that I feed Google.

I was experiencing it. Then I realised f-droid just hadn't updated in a while - no doubt it's that Google battery saver feature where the programs I want my phone to run to achieve some background task get banned.

Since updating manually (in f-droid) i have been a happy camper.

F-droid sometimes lags a couple days behind the latest updates. Usually the parsing errors are fixed within a day or two and made available on the official site before f-droid. As far as I know, those are usually caused by updates to youtube itself.

It's because F-droid builds these every week instead of as soon as it is out.

Yeah honestly as far as app repositories go, f-droid's usually pretty good at keeping things up to date. I use it for most apps I can get off there, newpipe's about the only one I bother grabbing straight from the site because I get impatient.

Yes. Just installed it. Result on first video: Exception in NewPipe 0.19.3

    {"user_action":"requested stream","request":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRdkI09KCpk","content_language":"en_US","service":"YouTube","package":"org.schabi.newpipe","version":"0.19.3","os":"Linux Android 8.0.0 - 26","time":"2020-07-18 05:29","exceptions":["org.schabi.newpipe.extractor.stream.StreamInfo$StreamExtractException: Could not get any stream. See error variable to get further details.\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.extractor.stream.StreamInfo.extractStreams(StreamInfo.java:192)\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.extractor.stream.StreamInfo.getInfo(StreamInfo.java:70)\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.extractor.stream.StreamInfo.getInfo(StreamInfo.java:62)\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.util.ExtractorHelper.lambda$getStreamInfo$3(ExtractorHelper.java:116)\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.util.-$$Lambda$ExtractorHelper$5fJcha6Sq5APJBLdG6osaJby-mc.call(Unknown Source:4)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.single.SingleFromCallable.subscribeActual(SingleFromCallable.java:44)\n\tat io.reactivex.Single.subscribe(Single.java:3438)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.single.SingleDoOnSuccess.subscribeActual(SingleDoOnSuccess.java:35)\n\tat io.reactivex.Single.subscribe(Single.java:3438)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeFromSingle.subscribeActual(MaybeFromSingle.java:41)\n\tat io.reactivex.Maybe.subscribe(Maybe.java:4154)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeConcatArray$ConcatMaybeObserver.drain(MaybeConcatArray.java:153)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeConcatArray$ConcatMaybeObserver.request(MaybeConcatArray.java:78)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.flowable.FlowableElementAtMaybe$ElementAtSubscriber.onSubscribe(FlowableElementAtMaybe.java:66)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeConcatArray.subscribeActual(MaybeConcatArray.java:42)\n\tat io.reactivex.Flowable.subscribe(Flowable.java:14479)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.flowable.FlowableElementAtMaybe.subscribeActual(FlowableElementAtMaybe.java:36)\n\tat io.reactivex.Maybe.subscribe(Maybe.java:4154)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeToSingle.subscribeActual(MaybeToSingle.java:46)\n\tat io.reactivex.Single.subscribe(Single.java:3438)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.single.SingleSubscribeOn$SubscribeOnObserver.run(SingleSubscribeOn.java:89)\n\tat io.reactivex.Scheduler$DisposeTask.run(Scheduler.java:578)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.schedulers.ScheduledRunnable.run(ScheduledRunnable.java:66)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.schedulers.ScheduledRunnable.call(ScheduledRunnable.java:57)\n\tat java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:266)\n\tat java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.run(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:301)\n\tat java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1162)\n\tat java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:636)\n\tat java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:764)\n"],"user_comment":""}

And this isn't on anything hard or new. It's a London Underground technical video.

You probably installed from some app store?

You need to install from the github repository. Youtube changes interface every once in a while, this is really isnt any app's fault, but youtube's. Same thing happens to youtube-dl all the time.

Yes, F-droid, which NewPipe says they support.

If the app crashes with a Java stack backtrace, it's the app's fault.

This app is not for you. Use the mainstream.

Is it just me or has HN seen a huge influx of less-than-the-current-average "computer intelligence" in the last 6 months?

you don't know what you are talking about. invest a minute and check out animats history.

Looks like you have an old version. It says 0.19.6 is the current release. I haven’t tried this app but I suspect getting up to date will fix that.

same experience when i was on android (around v7) and f-droid. it basically crashed/failed every time. i use ytdl quite a lot and updating it once every few months is sufficient ...

I've been using NewPipe for years, and find it to be an example of how an app should be. Besides that it doesn't force you to log in to keep things like subscriptions, one of the best things about it is that it's very snappy, whereas the YouTube app is like every other Google app in that it's slow and not very responsive. Being able to play audio in the background is the killer feature for me.

When I broke my Android and had to use an old iPhone, the background audio feature in NewPipe was probably what I missed the most.

> There seems to be no iOS equivalent, which is one of the things preventing me from upgrading to an iPad.

I use an iPhone 6 and have refused to upgrade iOS to the latest version, so there are quite a few apps that don't work on my phone anymore (when launched, they show a message saying I need to get the latest version of the app, but then I can't get it because it's not available for my version of iOS), one of those apps is YouTube, so I'm limited to accessing it through the browser. It would be great to have a good alternative.

Why not upgrade to the latest version?

I don't know about op, but when I was using iOS, I developed a firm "only one major OS upgrade allowed" rule after two of my devices were effectively hobbled / near-bricked by iOS upgrades 2+ major versions after the store-bought version.

The latest iOS version (from Sept 2019) isn’t even compatible with iPhone 6, so it’s not even an option to upgrade.

I've had bad experiences upgrading old iPhones. Usually the older os runs better.

If you have installed the app before, you should be able to open the App Store, and go to your past purchases. If you find the app in there, then it should download the last compatible version.

I have used that to load old apps onto an iPad that I can't update.

You can also upload IPA files to your iPhone using older versions of iTunes that supports sideloading saved (but purchased) IPA files. Apple now offers downloads for these older versions of iTunes, see here: https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes

Apple also makes iTunes 12.6.x available for download, but it's hidden on this page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208079 - this is the last Windows version with IPA management, but there are also other ways to sideload IPA files without needing XCode and a developer signing certificate, e.g. https://codeburst.io/latest-itunes-12-7-removed-the-apps-opt...

The question is - how are we supposed to save and archive those IPA files today?

https://twitter.com/appledry05/status/1256316190403764226

FilzaEscaped requires you to be jailbroken.

I should have said that I was asking how users can acquire IPA files without having jailbroken their device first.

Oh, I’m sorry for that. I wasn’t trying to be unhelpful or pedantic or obtuse. I hope it’s still helpful to another.

I’ve used this to do other functions before, but not saving IPAs.

https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-manage-apps-without-itunes

Yes, the app downloads, but then the message still shows up. It's not a phone/os problem, it's the app makers forcing users to only use the latest version.

>I use an iPhone 6 and have refused to upgrade iOS to the latest version

Why not get an Android then?

One less act of defiance to brag about on internet forums?

security updates? i don't need no stinking security updates!

I do have an Android and don't like it as much.

It works well for me on Android TV with Nvidia Shield. At one point I noticed after a Newpipe upgrade I couldn't get the cursor to go down to the list of videos. So I downgraded for a couple of weeks. Then when the next version came out I tried it and it was fine again.

One weird thing I noticed was that I used to be able to get a mouse style cursor with the right stick, but that stopped working at some point. Not sure if the change was NewPipe or OS level, but it's still manageable.

If you have USB ports you can always try other types of inputs. Aside from plain keyboard/mouse, there are a bunch of interesting options these days.

I use Smart YouTube TV on the shield, same thing but works a lot better with the controller and tvs in general

I have a shield, and I generally just use the TV remote controlling the shield via HDMI CEC. Maybe that's why it doesn't work well for me. I'll have to try it again.

Shield user here, as of 0.19.5 most things work via a Logitech harmony, so I assume most remotes work at this point. The pause / unpause buttons sometimes result in the UI getting into a weird state.

Yeah that could be it. I use the gamepad or sometimes an air mouse. Both work fine. My only gripe is Nvidia doesn't let you put side loaded apps on the homescreen.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/musi-simple-music-streaming/id...

It would be nice if you could sort subscriptions by date. Last time I used it, this wasn't possible, making the entire subscription functionality useless.

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