Hacker News Reader

Comment by xwx | Hacker News Reader

Vanced is pretty good. It seems like it's just the official YouTube app but with premium for free.

Newpipe is another ad-free YouTube app. https://newpipe.net/

It's FOSS and doesn't use your Google account, or any of the YouTube APIs. You can still manage subscriptions but you have to import them manually.

View on HN

There's also this fork that includes sponsorblock: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe

A fork?

Venced has sponsor block by default.

A fork of newpipe, not Vanced.

Ah yes makes sense!

Unfortunately it's very buggy and still not ready for full time use. Crashes all the time, importing subscriptions is hard. But it's FOSS and I still use it regardless cause vanced concerns me because it needs access to my account

It's a lot less crashy nowadays (at least from what I can tell from using it daily).

I want to like NewPipe but I've always had problems with resuming videos after pausing them in the background. Most of the time my progress is just completely lost. Also, full screen and popover mode have been broken since Android 12. I use Vanced at this point.

Resuming issues were bug in the last few versions, but has been fixed in the latest release.

Still broken for me, and I've used the thing for years - very familiar with the quirks.

Also a long time user, but the issues described were only the last few months for me. Perhaps there are device specific bugs. I just rolled back to an earlier version until they were remedied

I assume most of NewPipe crashing when trying to open a video, is Google changing the YouTube video page to stop non-official clients from being able to watch the video.

NewPipe has had multiple unfixed regressions around opening videos, the pop-up player, and losing the time index of the current video.

They started (for me) in the version that addressed the youtube change then the last two did nothing to fix them (for me) I used NewPipe for years many hours a day on multiple tablets and this recent issues are the only ones that's a showstopper - I'm on Vanced until the next update.

I personally use a different, fame account for Vanced. Most people should be doing that anyway because who knows when Google will crackdown on it and start blocking any account using Vanced.

Newpipe is what I use and I love it. I've seen it break on a few occupations and it could use a bit more polish, but it meets my needs. I might give Vanced a try at some point, but it looks like it wants access to your youtube account and lacks features I use. I'm pretty happy with Newpipe.

https://github.com/Elijas/auto-youtube-subscription-playlist...

I use google spread sheet script to manage a bunch subscriptions into different private playlists accessible via sharelinks in Newpipe. Allows me to keep things in sync with youtube account on other devices.

It explicitly doesn't provide Premium for free, all premium features but the picture in picture support are still locked behind purchase.

The standout features are ad- and sponsorblock.

Huh, interesting. Maybe it's changed, maybe I'm misremembering.

In either case NewPipe has picture-in-picture playback and audio only playback. Not sure what else I'm missing from Premium.

In my expierience New Pipe is lacking. The fact you have to reimport the subscriptions manually is very tedious, besides I've found New Pipe breaks often and it won't let me load videos. It's pretty cool for listening to music while the screen is off, but I wouldn't recommend it as a daily Youtube driver.

As opposed to giving your Google password to Vanced?

You're not giving it to Vanced. It works through Micro G which uses Google's oauth flow to authenticate you.

Anyway, personally I've moved my YouTube account to a dummy account.

I've never seen it actually "break".

The only times it's not working is because YouTube changed something and you need to download a new version which works pretty good with the appropriate repo in F-Droid.

Did they fix that you have to update it only through GitHub?

I don't know when this was the case but it hasn't been since I've been using it.

I just added the repo to F-Droid: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/

It tells me that there is a new version. It downloads it from somewhere and installs it. It could be GitHub but I don't know.

>The fact you have to reimport the subscriptions manually is very tedious

Why not just use RSS for Youtube updates? Or do you not use RSS at all?

I used to use Newpipe, but I realized that I couldn't port my YT playlists (how I keep track of music) to it. Vanced lets me log into my YT account so all of my playlists were available right off the bat.

Not only that, but also sponsorblock, awesome feature that skips sponsors mid video (it can also skip other things like intros and stuff)

Correction: venced supports sponsorblock

Reply on news.ycombinator.com