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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to shit on this, but NewPipe sucks. In my experience it's a waste of time to try and use it as a YT client replacement. It barely works, if at all. Casting definitely never ever worked for me, not even once.

The user experience is unfamiliar and seems significantly worse than Vanced.

Vanced is what the official youbutt app should've been. RIP.

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> Sorry to shit on this, but NewPipe sucks. In my experience it's a waste of time to try and use it as a YT client replacement.

Hard disagree. NewPipe is the only way I use youtube on mobile.

> It barely works, if at all. Casting definitely never ever worked for me, not even once.

Because casting requires usage of Google API's and NewPipe is privacy oriented.

It's not broken, it's as intended.

> The user experience is unfamiliar and seems significantly worse than Vanced.

I prefer it to default youtube . It's no nonsense, and gets the job done.

Haven't used vanced, so can't judge there.

If the casting isn't meant to actually work, it'd be great if the devs would get rid of the button...

Sorry, but until such things are rectified, New Pipe is a hell no for me; -10/10, worse than vanced, cannot recommend sharp-edged user-unfriendly software. Even when it's OSS and privacy friendly.

For a similar case, see gnuPGP. We all know how that one ended up not saving the world :(

I should specify I was talking about chromecast specifically - I think it may support other protocols.

That being said, I can't find the cast button you're talking about.

I also can't find the sharp edges you mention[0] could you give other examples? In my experience I've just had it do what it says on the box with no fuss.

[0] though I'll admit my tastes are minimalistic and I avoid cloud tools as much as possible - either or both of those may color my views.

For example, I see not having access to Youtube account information as a positive.

Others have already covered the sharp edges elsewhere in this thread.

My specific (brief) experiences include: Instead of playing the video..

- Wait forever while it spins.

- Crashes randomly. Repeatedly.

- No way to reference previously watched or liked videos.

- Atrocious, non-functional search.

Have all these bugs have been fixed in the past 6 months?

Bar about a day when youtube-the-site made an update that broke newpipe's parsing, I've never seen the first two.

There's a history tab, I don't really use ot but looking over it now it looks decent, and can sort by most and last played.

The only issue I've had with search is that it doesn't return playlists, but my typical flow is to go to the profile page and follow a link from there so it hasn't bothered me.

Just as another data point, I use and enjoy NewPipe, but definitely experience the first two points listed above- I get crashes and failures to load not infrequently.

Perhaps a hardware issue, or NewPipe handles spotty connections poorly or something.

> Because casting requires usage of Google API's and NewPipe is privacy oriented.

Do you happen to have a link to a GitHub issue or some other background? I'd like to learn more about this, I was under the impression cast-type devices (including Chromecast) usually implement DLNA which should be interface-able without any proprietary APIs. This is just from vague readings and recollections though.

I read a somewhat long discussion on it a while ago on Github, I'll edit when I find it.

Found it! The discussion was regarding Chromecast specifically,so I don't know about other cast setups.

Also is from Nov 2021, so possibly out of date at this point?

I've linked to the concluding comment here, I found the whole chain worth reading however:

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/668#issuecomme...

Thanks for digging that up Shared404 (btw, cool HN profile, though I can't figure out what is "PFY"?)

Is the biggest challenge really in providing an AppID? I must be missing something because that doesn't seem like a big privacy concern or technical hurdle, which brings us back to no traceable logical problem other than "it's hard to do and I don't get paid for this" (which would be a fair position for an OSS maintainer to take).

Maybe the should look at how VLC streams to Chromecasts, because at least in the case of VLC, it's FOSS and sort of works.

Many thanks!

The PFY is a reference to a character (the "Pimply Faced Youth") from The Bastard Operator from Hell [0]! I'm just starting out my career, so it felt appropriate.

My understanding is that they mostly didn't want to do anything more involved with Google than scrape a webpage and write an Android app - though I'm not on the team and haven't participated and couldn't say for sure.

I think they have looked at VLC - there's a lengthy workaround lower in the thread via VLC, but I've not read that part in depth.

Actually, just double checked. Looks like theres a mention here: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/668#issuecomme... of that being a possibility, but no ones commented on it or made any progress yet afaict.

[0] Originals here: http://bofharchive.com/BOFH.html, and I think The Register has new ones.

The newPipe app did identify the usual cast targets on my local network, but everything went downhill from there. It's a shame that this sort of nonsense has wasted the time of many a user and not contributed to a happy new eco system.

Maybe now that Vanced is toast, someone will step up and lay the pipe into newPipe to get it working properly? Is this just wishful thinking? We need a hero..

Chromecast uses DIAL and CASTV2 as protocols.

Rather than just dis, could you be specific? It works for me, and I know a number of people who use it since they find it is better for them than the official client.

I've found it very flaky in the past. Half the time it can't load a video or it crashes while playing the video. I'd understand if some of the issues came from being throttled the way yt-dl does, but the Android user agent that my phone has (which is the workaround that yt-dlp uses right now to be unthrottled) should present unthrottled downloads. I have a better experience having a service running on my seedbox which downloads and serves a Youtube video than using Newpipe, which says something.

The app has been very stable for me for years now. It breaks every so often when YouTube changes its APIs, but the devs are quick to update it, so it rarely inconveniences me for long.

> It breaks every so often when YouTube changes its APIs

Slight nitpick here - NewPipe doesn't use any API's directly, just scrapes the webpage.

In my case "in the past" was 6 months ago. After the last bout of instability, I just gave up.

- Video playback breaks regularly and it takes 4-5 days for fixes to hit F-Droid. This is waaaay too slow.

- Random other stuff keeps breaking, not that the 100+ lines of recursive Java gibberish in the crash popups tell you what broke (but the crash reporter itself does break regularly, too)

- App structure is counterintuitive: You have tabs on the main screen, and the side bar... duplicates the tab buttons, but turns the tabs into overlays that disable search and other functions? What?

- Content discovery is a mess: I cannot search specific channels. I cannot sort results. I cannot access channel playlists. It's always faster to open a browser and use the youtube website for this, even on mobile.

- Content organization is a mess: I cannot sort anything, period. Nor can I filter (e.g. to filter out videos already watched, or filter for videos started but not finished, ...), or bookmark specific videos, or do anything else with the content.

- Speaking of already watched videos, tracking progress isn't reliable.

- A few updates ago, video playback was turned into a multi-stage procedure, and now I need 3+ clicks to exit a video that already finished playing. What?

- Video overlay UX is horrible. I don't even know what details to go into, nothing about it is intuitive and I ended up crashing Newpipe a few times just trying to exit it (or go back to regular view), and I gave up on ever trying to use it.

And so on and so forth. That's just off the top of my head.

NewPipe works if you're subscribed to a small amount of channels that update rarely, and you go watch each video when it comes out, so you don't lose track of what's where and what you watched, and don't mind the occasional youtube-free week. For anything else it breaks down quickly, and hard.

If you're, like me, subscribed to a dozen channels that have backlogs in the hundreds of videos to go through, it's a nightmare. I force myself to use it to minimize my exposure to YT's website/client, but I am not enjoying the experience and cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.

I'll just note that you first issue, with updates being delayed by 4-5 days is a general F-Droid issue and not specific to NewPipe. The delay exists, because F-Droid builds every application on their own server and that takes a while. You could search for an alternative repo that just pulls the apk from github (maybe Izzydroid?), or host one yourself.

If you install their APK manually it can notify you when there's an update, and just a tap to download the new APK. There's also an offical newpipe repo you can add to f-droid.

> Casting definitely never ever worked for me, not even once.

How did you cast it? It worked perfectly when I casted it with Kodi.

I use Newpipe every day, it works great for me.

This post glows

Maybe but Vanced was undeniably easier to use and transition to if you were used to the official app. I knew totally tech illiterate people using the app specifically because there was 0 difference with the official app. Once they just got it installed by someone they knew everything just worked and it was easy to update. Very very different from newpipe, which barely even has support for basic features like subscriptions.

The people here don't use that term, and they aren't the type to accept it. You get what I mean? It's only associated with bad outcomes here.

I have never heard the term. What does it mean?

It's a reference to a delusion by the late Terry A. Davis. Basically, it implies that the poster above is a CIA agent or government operative

> "This post glows"

That didn't used to be a "g" there, would be my guess.

Oh, that is just dumb

FYI it's a reference to something else. He's basically calling you a fed/gov shill. It's a reference to glow in the dark CIA agents that schizophrenic late programmer Terry Davis claimed were following him. So it turned into a meme, and now glowie means fed/3 letter agency/police and saying that something glows means it's shady. I dont know how he got that from your comment.

(A comment that "glows" would usually be something like: hey fellow members of radical political ideology, who is up for letting those politicians know what lead tastes like? Let's conspire to commit domestic terrorism!" )

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