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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

Invidious is such a treasure and something I do not want to see go by the wayside. I would like to think, for whoever is available to work on the project with the time in energy, there could be enough support to keep this going via donations.

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There have been other alternatives in the past and there will be other alternatives in the future. I've found the most reliable option is to run my own and not rely on someone else's service which can break at any time and disappear at any time.

Interfacing with YouTube in any unofficial way is fraught with peril by its very nature because YouTube is always trying to stop it.

I'm glad that we have the option to self-host, and would be curious to learn more if you have other self-hosted youtube frontend options. As it stands now I think if invidious isn't maintained it will likely break soon. Newpipe breaks every other week and it's actively maintained.

Invidious I found to be uniquely and particularly convenient because, for a while at least, it ran like any other website and I could skip the steps needed to self host.

There's also this which includes a frontend:

https://github.com/Athlon1600/youtube-downloader

I'm unaffiliated but I like to follow this particular project when I want to know if others are having the same trouble with YouTube when things break for me. I only ever implemented a backend myself when I chose to self host.

I'm gonna reconsider using Athlon1600/youtube-downloader in my projects but from what I remember of benchmarks I did about 8 months ago my fork of youtubedown was faster like obtain a video url in 300ms faster. In my projects I lazy load the video on demand when the user pushes play instead of preloading video at page load so minimizing the time to obtain a video url matters to me.

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