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code_biologist·

While we're on the topic of privacy focused frontends, anyone have recommendations for similar YouTube frontends?

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The LibRedirect website has a great list of alternatives: https://libredirect.github.io/

Piped is one option: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

Invidious is another[1].

I use Piped with Yattee[2] over Tailscale and it works great.

1. https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

2. https://github.com/yattee/yattee

Piped and Invidious.

I prefer Invidious for vague reasons, though either it or the instance I use most often seems to fail about 25--50% of the time on videos, with more popular content (e.g., music) failing most often, so I'll fall back to Piped.

Otherwise I use mpv / ytdl, and in fact greatly prefer that approach.

For those prefering a standalone GUI, there's VLC.

I also quite enjoy the mpv/yt-dl(p) setup, and I often pair it with ytfzf[1] to ease the search part. FreeTube[2] is also a nicely done desktop frontend, capable of proxying requests through invidious.

[1]: https://github.com/pystardust/ytfzf

[2]: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

Search is the one thing that mpv & yt-dlp don't handle. The now-moribund mps-youtube did offer search and curation and remains hands down the best interface to that service I've ever used. (It was throttled by API limits, I strongly suspect intentionally by Google.)

I've started seeing some CLI youtube search front-ends, though I've yet to try them. Thanks for mentioning ytfzf, as I'm not sure that's popped up for me before.

invidious is the closest analogue, if its still alive.

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