Invidious: An alternative front-end to YouTube

Good list. My biggest gripe is still that I cannot queue things on a mobile device. It seems like such a big omission.

I spent a decent chunk of time paying for Youtube Premium (Red at the time) and eventually I stopped signing in and started using NewPipe on my phone instead, even though I was still paying. Partially that was for privacy reasons, but the bigger reason is that NewPipe is just an improvement over the official app in just about every single way.

Similar experience to you:

- Downloads weren't reliable. I'm paying money to do this "legitimately", and my offline videos just stop working randomly, I couldn't trust that they'll still be there when I open my phone.

- Battery life. Oh my goodness, battery life.

- Device limits. I ran into scenarios where if I was signed into Youtube on my phone and desktop and I started playing a video, all of the other videos on every other device would stop and I would get a message shaming me about account sharing or something. This is a paid experience that's worse than just using stock Youtube without paying anyone. Stock Youtube doesn't have any device limits.

- Notifications, recommendation engines, blegh... I can turn off comments in NewPipe. I can turn off recommended videos entirely.

- Patchy control over data usage. I never really felt like I could trust the app not to start downloading things over a mobile connection no matter what settings I checked.

- Ads in the app for Youtube Red, the thing that I was already paying for. This kind of made me mad, I was paying to show support for a non-advertising model, and Google instead kept bugging me about exclusive Youtube Red content.

- No good queuing system without making lists (this may have changed, I think the Youtube website supports queues at this point, so maybe the app does now as well).

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Eventually I stopped paying for Youtube Red because I didn't see what the point was and I couldn't figure out what I was accomplishing. I wanted to signal to Youtube that I was willing to pay for a better experience, but they weren't getting that message and I didn't seem to be communicating what I wanted to communicate. And since I wasn't using the official client at that point, none of my subscriptions were going to the channels I wanted to support, so I did the math and found out that direct donations were a much more economical/impactful way for me to support them. I was just donating money to Google for no reason.

I'm willing to pay for services like Youtube if they were willing to put in even the bare minimum of effort on this stuff. But what am I paying for? The old Youtube Red app was worse than using Youtube in a browser, and considerably worse than front-ends like NewPipe. I don't think I'm being greedy or unreasonable asking Youtube for a button that lets me turn off video recommendations.

Maybe the service has gotten better now, I haven't checked. But it doesn't sound like it has. The entire Youtube experience feels needlessly adversarial. It's not about piracy[0], it's not about consuming content for free. I spent a decent chunk of time quite literally giving Google money for nothing; giving them money even though I wasn't using their app. I am willing to pay for the infrastructure and hosting that Youtube provides.

I just want a good experience, and there's still no option for me to pay Google for a good Youtube experience. And giving them money doesn't seem to be incentivizing them to fix any of it. It's really just embarrassing that a 3rd-party project using an unofficial API is so much better than every native client that Youtube is offering.

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[0]: Although to be clear, I do not believe that using NewPipe is actually piracy under any legal definition.

I'm surprised to hear that the Android YouTube experience sucks, I've long believed Google were deliberately making the iOS YouTube experience as awful as possible as some kind of lure to Android. The gripes list for iOS, browser or app, would well exceed the character count for a HN comment.

Why can't we read comments on other platforms like Roku? Always I see a video on my TV and then wonder what the comments are, so have to find the video on my phone or computer.

I love invidious, but this:

> The only issue I've had is that it sometimes refuses to play some videos because the media cannot be loaded.

Happens to me with lots of videos — about half the videos that I try to open if I had to guess. That makes Invidious pretty much unusable for me.

+1 for the Privacy Redirect plugin. Makes using Invidious (and some other platforms) a breeze.

Alternative yt desktop app is https://freetubeapp.io/

Right now I'm using these kind of shitty shell scripts to download the videos, ls to list them, and mpv on the command line to play them. These use a file called "channels" which contains YouTube channel URLs and space-separated tags, like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClaEdLrmti779-tyovta8zw grandpa amu hardware carpentry hacking
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLt9kIslIa1ffiM8A04KORw wm levsha hardware hacking

Here are the scripts, slightly cleaned up:

snarf:

    #!/bin/sh
    echo "snarf $@"
    exec python3 ../youtube-dl -f '[height<769]' -i -r 1M -R 1 \
     --sleep-interval "${wait-227}" --max-filesize "${max_filesize-242m}" \
     --no-mtime --playlist-end ${n-5} --write-info-json --add-metadata \
     --write-description --write-thumbnail --write-auto-sub \
     --write-sub --sub-lang en,es "$@"

snarf-tags:

    #!/bin/sh
    exec ./snarf $(./tag "$@" | shuf | sed 's,$,/videos,')

search:

    #!/bin/sh
    exec ./snarf ytsearch10:"$(echo "$@" | sed 's, ,+,g')"

resnarf:

    #!/bin/sh
    : ${1?Usage: $0 foo.mp4.part}
    
    # example: garbage\ stuff\ -zKLMCO0-How.mp4.part
    
    for x in "$@"; do
     x=$(echo "$x" | perl -ne 'm,(.{11})\.mp4,; print $1')
     ./snarf "https://youtu.be/$x"
    done

tag:

    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    import sys
    
    def match(args, line):
        return (not any('-' + word in args for word in line) 
            and not any(word not in line for word in args if word[0] != '-'))
    
    def main(args, input, output):
        for line in input:
            words = line.split()
            if match(args, words):
                output.write(words[0] + "\n")
    
    if __name__ == '__main__':
        main(sys.argv[1:], open('channels'), sys.stdout)

So my searchbar is "wait=3 ./search japanese hornets" or "./search electrochemical machining advances", and periodically I run "./snarf-tags" to download any new videos over the next few hours, which I can then see with "ls -lart ./*4". And if I want to know where some great search-result video came from so I can add it to the list of channels, why, that's "jq -r .uploader_url Romanes\ Eunt\ Domus\ EXPLAINED\ _\ Monty\ Python\'s\ Life\ of\ Brian\ •\ Fun\ with\ Latin-UfH6gjxTTgE.info.json", which sounds horrible but it's really more like ^Rjq^A M-f M-f M-f ^K Ro<TAB>.

Suggested videos and thumbnail display, not to mention buttons to press for the above things, would be a welcome addition, but thumbnail display is difficult in the terminal. Also, it would be pretty great to have a way to not redownload a video after I deleted it, and for youtube-dl to not wait the 227 seconds before deciding not to download a video because it's a four-hour snoozefest recorded livestream.

That seems interesting. I'd give that a try. I'm not satisfied with any clients I've tried so far.

There's already some competition in this space: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

I think a lot of people are looking for that. This is especially true for folks with lower-end hardware where hardware decoding may be supported by the system but not (well) by the browser, or at least the rest of the browser runtime would use way too much resources.

NewPipe on Android is somewhat popular because it's much lighter than other Youtube clients (browser included) and enables features which Youtube official clients prevent on purpose (audio-only, download). We don't have an equivalent to that on the desktop. gtk-pipe-viewer [0] is close to that, but is not widely available yet.

A problem you need to tackle when distributing a 3rd party client for a centralized network is you have to deal with constant micro-changes in the public-facing API, which the silo does on purpose to break 3rd party clients. youtube-dl from distro repos is almost unusable all the time because of that except on rolling-release (most people use pip version instead), and Newpipe had to make their own F-Droid repository because f-droid.org vetting/build process is too slow for that particular usecase. [1]

EDIT: If you're looking for solutions to distribute your client, packaging for every distro out there is "hard" (better leave that to distro maintainers, except for your favorite distros of course) but there's a few distro-agnostic formats that are very easy to automate builds for: 0install, AppImage, Flatpak, guix, nix. The first two are statically linked (and PGP signed) and 0install is even compatible with Mac and Windows build (and any other platform, theoretically). Flatpaks are more Linux specific (some *BSD support in progress) and require a bit more setup to interface with other parts of the system escaping the sandbox (eg. for VAAPI), see the Portals mechanism. nix/guix are intended for reproducible builds: you need to package your dependencies first so it's definitely easier to get started if most of your dependency tree is already packaged there.

All in all, supporting those 5 build systems should keep you busy for a few days at the start of your project but will be a huge win for portability and maintainability in the long run. If your project's architecture is not too complex and the dependencies are easy to package, some external contributors (me?) could help with that.

Good luck on your project!

[0] https://github.com/trizen/pipe-viewer [1] As a user i'm happy f-droid.org default repo goes to great length to ensure quality of apps on there and that no antifeature are silently introduced by updates, but i'm also happy apps with specific needs for rapid upgrades like Newpipe can develop their own repo, and a simple QRCode can help bootstrap the repository entry + PGP key without having to mess around with repo settings manually

Which RSS reader do you use?

Invidious provides RSS feeds from channels. You can do this with YouTube as well (or at least you could) but it isn't obvious. You add these feeds to an RSS reader and you have privacy-friendly subscription without Google creeping in the background nor annoying you with dark pattern and their perverted idea of GDPR "compliance".

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3gy8hkVMqwQ doesn't work.

https://invidious-us.kavin.rocks/watch?v=3gy8hkVMqwQ works.

it has channel rss feeds you can put into $reader of choice and avoid any dependence on youtube account or tracking

Isn't it the purpose of the new "Add to queue" feature? Hover a video add you'll see a "Watch later" and "Add to queue". Never used it myself.