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Comment by noman-land | Hacker News Reader

NewPipe is the best. Dunno how people watch YouTube without it. You can also subscribe to channels from it without a YouTube account.

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I'm watching fine on Firefox with uBlock Origin. I mean, I don't get ads. What else am I missing by not using NewPipe (I don't care about downloading videos).

The parent wrote

> You can also subscribe to channels from it without a YouTube account.

This means that losing your Google account does not mean losing your playlist.

Big tech accounts can be surprisingly fragile.

FYI Google takeout lets you set regular, automatic exports of any of your Google data (e.g. you can have a backup of your YouTube subscriptions, playlists etc emailed to you every month).

> you can have a backup of your YouTube subscriptions, playlists etc emailed to you every month

Sent to your gmail account? :D

Any email address you choose AFAIK

IIRC, newpipe can even load the file from takeout and add all of your subscriptions from it.

One can't switch to a different tab, out of the browser or lock the phone while continuing listening to the video/podcast/music.

One actually can - using an extension called Video background play fix

Subscribing to channels. Trim silences. Various pitch and speed options. Background play. Picture in picture. Watch history. Playlists. NewPipe also plays Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and has the entire media.ccc.de library and can do all those things with those services as well.

One of my most used F-Droid apps.

Almost all of those you get from just using the normal website with uBlock Origin and a browser lol. Not really exclusive features.

Don't you have to be logged in to get all of those features? For obvious reasons I didn't even consider that to be a option, as the goal is to put as many barriers between Google servers and yourself as possible.

Thanks, convinced - I'll give it a try

It's extremely simple: I pay for Premium.

How can you disable tiktok on youtube? I've been a paying customer for years and I would happily pay more to remove this cancer.

Do you mean their Shorts feature?

Big +1. I feel I can keep my kids YouTube usage under control and effectively moderate what they watch. With shorts I can't scroll through the 100 shorts they quickly swiped through, have no idea which ones they actually watched, and I frequently see a lot of inappropriate content in shorts that I don't normally see on their accounts.

Shorts actually makes me want to ban YT in my house altogether and cancel my premium sub

Agree, but unfortunately I still can't use it to stream to my Chromecast so I need to go to the YouTube app when I want to play stuff on TV

Can't you just display your screen using chromecast? I use newpipe on my tv all the time by juat plugging my phone in via HDMI.

SmartTube supports Chromecast/Android TV: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

To be clear, it doesn't support casting, which is what the previous commenter was asking for.

It runs directly on android tv. The app even says that there is no support for phones or tablets so casting isn't going to work.

I also agree that casting is the major missing feature from all these apps. Mirroring might be a substitute for some but, again to be clear, it isn't the same as casting and in most cases the quality is going to suffer significantly.

Sure, but I think thats still a viable workaround - especially as SmartTube plays the video natively on the device with maximum available quality.

Sure, if you have the video link in your phone, you might need to get it to the TV/Chromecast somehow, but I think that is usually manageable.

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