NewPipe 0.26 | Hacker News Reader

NewPipe 0.26

github.com

210 pointsrc0091 comments

Hail NewPipe! “Background” playback is just awesome and only downloads the audio stream. Use it all the time for listening to lectures and presentations as podcasts.

I tried to do the same with music but for some reason the next enqueued song has the tendency of going straight up to 20 min, 60 min, 3 hour, 10 hour long videos.

Not sure why. But this was reliably repeatable. Starting from any given song, I'd hit Next and before 5 to 10 videos I'd already be in the 10hrs long spectrum.

Another thing that would also happen too frequently is that the next suggested video gets locked on always different videos of the same song. Once and again.

Without any way to limit video duration and some filter to skip videos with a too similar name to the ones already played, it was useless to me.

We could argue that that's just the next video suggested by YouTube's server. But YouTube ReVanced, on the other hand, doesn't exhibit any of those issues and starting from any song, will enqueue a variety of mostly non-repeated, single-song videos. Much better.

Are you not putting specific videos into a playlist and then playing the playlist? You make it sound like some sort of magic is taking place adding videos you didn't personally vet.

It has autoplay, just like normal YouTube.

Yeah, I meant the autoplay, aka. "Auto-queue next stream":

https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/player-enable-autoplay/

I don't believe it's on by default. I've never run into it before (thankfully).

YouTube premium does that too, it did even when it was called YouTube red. As well as hacked versions of the YouTube app that always enable premium features.

What is nice with NewPipe is that it is independent from the YouTube app.

Youtube revanced does this too

Android rules

On Firefox mobile, on the official YouTube.com website, if you want to be able to play in the background, all you have to do is request the desktop version of the site... Newpipe is a better way though

You can also use video background playback fix on both firefox and orion on iOS.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

Brave browser on mobile too

Newpipe is one of the best app I have on my phone. Congrats to the dev

I’m looking forward to having it on iOS. EU! Eu all the Way

That's going to be a long way off since it's a Java project and fairly well integrated into Android's APIs.

NewPipe Extractor [1] can be used independently, e.g. the piped web front-end [2] also uses it.

[1] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor

[2] https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

I missed something - is the EU forcing Apple to let people use the phones they buy? If so, how?

Digital Markets Act

As of now, it looks more like a maybe, or am I wrong?

You can already use https://github.com/arichorn/uYouEnhanced today on iOS.

I‘m quite unsure…so I’m asking the community here. Is this a good newpipe distribution for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/newpipe-music-videos/id6450053...

tracking and in-app purchases? sounds like a Rip-off

i use https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe which is super amazing. sadly the PR to implement sponsorblock in the main newpipe was worked on for almost a year but unfortunately the youtube-dl fiasco happened around the same time and that spooked the devs who refused to import the PR.

That forced the PR author to set up the fork which is working surprisingly well. People were imagining that the fork would not survive but i have been using it since day 1 and can't imagine newpipe or libretube without sponsorblock.

+1 for sponsor block fork. Its available through Izzydroid repo [1] that can be added to F-droid. The author should release it soon as well. Its amazing how well it works

[1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...

Izzysoft is doing valuable effort.

Another fork with SponsorBlock support plus a few extra video platforms is the bravenewpipe

https://github.com/bravenewpipe/NewPipe

Just curious, because my intuition is that anyone who finds sponsorblock to be crucial is likely consuming a decent bid of media... What are your strategies for compensating the creators you enjoy?

compensation for what?

paint me ignorant but you read dozens of articles linked on HN daily. I do too, how many times have you compensated them?

people who blog for fun, or have a hobby or whatever. tomorrow they start streaming or recording and whatever so why should i compensate them?

why are we normalizing the idea that someone can suddenly start a youtube channel and now its the "responsibility" of subscribers to feed them?

its not a zero sum game. i understand that but the current model works or not, i dont know because i do not contribute.

Compensation for their time and energy. Imagine if your boss asked you the same question after a month of hard work: "Compensation for what?"

I do like to make use of donation buttons when provided. I buy books and merch for the sole purpose of supporting creators across several mediums.

For much of my life I was extremely impoverished and had to rely on piracy and other means to fulfill my consumption habits. However now that I can afford it, I try to return the favor by compensating creators and subsidizing the new generation of broke nerds.

> why are we normalizing the idea that someone can suddenly start a youtube channel and now its the "responsibility" of subscribers to feed them?

Why are we denormalizing the idea that people shouldn't be rewarded for the hard work that they do for their communities? No one is twisting your arm; ethical consumption is clearly an opt-in model in the current internet.

You are free to continue pirating content or viewing it without ads. Especially if you consume a wide berth of content, which is hard to financially support at scale, or have political stances against locked-in platforms (I sure do). You are also free to be considerate of the time and energy people spend on these projects which often times become their life's work.

None. They put their content out on a platform that does not require my contribution. YouTube was, and is, never about "compensating content creators" and I am under no obligation to do so, but they get paid anyway. Some get paid to add a segment from a sponsor, I choose to automatically skip that segment, but they still got paid for putting it in anyway.

Would I watch it if they were behind a subscription fee? No.

This argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. YouTube employs an ad model to pay creators, and tools like NewPipe and ad blockers (which I myself use, for good reason) circumvent this process. To not supplement it with alternative is to disrespect the time and energy required to make a video.

Some content is relatively cheap to produce, be it vlog format or whatever. And some creators don't care about compensation because they have existing revenue sources. But many creators do this full-time and depend on generating an income stream from their hard work. The rule of thumb is an hour of work per minute of video for many creators.

It is a matter of ethical consumption, which yes, you are not obligated to adhere to. But you should consider your consumption habits and review whether you are being fair to the people who work hard to inform or entertain you.

YouTube pays contributors a tiny fraction of their ad revenue in order to make more ad revenue. Sponsors pay them to include their products.

So yes, it does hold up to scrutiny. YouTube and sponsors are paying them. I am not obligated, ethically or otherwise, to watch adverts.

That makes zero sense. Most creators don't get significant sponsorship money. And they don't get paid for ads that aren't seen.

You don't get to resolve yourself of ethical obligations simply by saying you don't have them. Just be honest with yourself in that you like to exploit the time and energy of creators for your own entertainment without compensating them in some form. That's fine. But the ethics of the situation are much more nuanced than you choose to believe.

It makes all the sense. There is no subscription fee. There is no premise nor expectation of payment by the viewer. They get paid as a consequence of people viewing, ahead of time by sponsors, or as a payment in lieu by ad monetisation - or if lucky/good enough voluntary donations. Keyword voluntary. This expectation of donorship is a recent fad that is just banal and asinine at the same time.

By extension do you feel obliged to buy the products being advertised because they have incurred the expense to buy the ad space and/or sponsorship?

> This expectation of donorship is a recent fad

Actually, patronage was the default form of compensation for the arts during most of human history. You should question your world view.

> do you feel obliged to buy the products being advertised

Irrelevant to the conversation, let's dispense with straw man arguments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage

The expectation (that every singke viewer is obliged) is the recent fad, not the concept of donations. Are you deliberately obtuse or just incapable of distinguishing the two?

Not irrelevant nor a stawman, but does show the fault in your argument. Somewhat ironic of you to accuse that given the above. Oh well.

When at any point have I expressed that every single viewer is obliged to pay for the media they consume? I have not, and that is another straw man. I only pointed out that the ethics are much more nuanced than you are willing to accept.

At this point you are being disingenuous as well as devolving into insults, so I will end this discussion here. Please use good faith when engaging in discussions on this platform.

> You don't get to resolve yourself of ethical obligations

Forming an argument with the unfounded pretense that everyone is obliged to donate is somehow not claiming everyone is obliged to donate. Yet somehow I'm the disingenious one.

yeah. my understanding is this.

netflix/amazon prime are PAID only services. either you pay and get access or you do not pay and dont get access.

I am FINE with this. i have never paid for either and i do not plan to which means i cannot consume this media, again, fine by me.

when you put something on public internet, i am under no obligation to "compensate" anyone. put a paywall and prevent me from accessing your "service" like netflix.

Many people are patreon or other subscribers. Not needed to watch ads. I would rather pay than waste my bandwidth while on train.

I do support creators on patreon, but I find it is too expensive to scale to every creator whose content I enjoy.

I wish there was a tip jar under each video and that it integrated with alternative frontends such as NewPipe, but I also don't want to hear "don't forget to like and subscribe, make sure to hit the bell, and consider leaving a tip" in every single video.

> but I also don't want to hear "don't forget to like and subscribe, make sure to hit the bell, and consider leaving a tip" in every single video.

I don't know why youtube forces people do that, but it'd be nice if they fixed their algorithm so that it wasn't needed.

just white noise at this point for me

I don't use sponcerblock, but I do download all youtube videos before watching them and I manually fast forward past the ads. I'm sure that doesn't help them either.

As others have stated there's no obligation to give youtubers your time/attention/money/engagement, but when you've found a channel you enjoy it's natural to want to help them continue to put out good content.

Ultimately though my options for supporting youtubers are limited, because I'm not signing into youtube so I can't even comment/like/subscribe/ring bells or whatever else most people do.

I have in the past donated to youtubers directly. Mostly though I support them by spreading the word and watching their videos. Maybe one of the people I show the channel to will comment and hit the like button and buy a billion nord VPN subscriptions.

Also, checkout NewPipe with built in SponsorBlock functionality: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe

I wonder if this is something NewPipe would add in themselves. Would rather use the official version than a fork, if possible.

Edit: as soon as I posted that I read more than the first line of the readme and saw this link to the NewPipe blog - https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertisi...

NewPipe is one of the best apps available on Android. The only thing missing for me currently is Android Auto support.

Very esoteric app, however I think Ymusic needs to be mentioned whenever YT alternatives are brought up. It streams only the MP3 of the video and the UI is cleaner imo - so it's easier to use if you intend to only listen to "podcasts" or music as an alternative to Spotify.

Don't know about Ymusic as it doesn't seem open source, but seal [0] seems like a good alternative, based on yt-dlp

0: https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal

There's also ViMusic, which is open source: https://github.com/vfsfitvnm/ViMusic/

Sounds good. Newpipe can stream audio only too.

This is just begging the question: surely you don't watch videos while driving? And if you just want the audio, there are music-focused YT apps (ViMusic, or like sibling said, YMusic)

Newpipe has a built-in "Play in Background" feature that would be awesome while driving. There are tons of podcast-like content videos on YT that would be fine for a commute.

It works in my car, I have it running in background mode and I just select the media player in the car menu, no Android auto needed.

NewPipe is overwhelmingly my most used app. It's simply amazing.

I remember there being talks of a complete rewrite of Newpipe. Did anything come of that? I'm a happy user, so I don't really have an opinion on whether it should happen or not.

Schabi here: The team wants to start the rewrite in 2024 after 0.26.0 got released. The reson for the rewrite: Codebase got hard to maintin so we need to refactor. Also android changed the UI style and the UI frameworks a lot. We want to stay up to date with that.

How does one get involved? Are contributors welcome? – I know Kotlin and Jetpack Compose much better than the old ways of Android UIs though.

Yes. Contributors are abaoloutly welcome, and Jetpack and Kotlin is exactly what we are looking for. However we need to prepare and sort out things before we can start. Stay put and follow our blog to find out when we begin: https://newpipe.net/blog

Pretty happy 0.26.0 went out first. There's a lot of big changes and fixes in there that really are huge steps forward in the app.

Newpipe has always unreliable and prone to not working for me, unfortunately. Crashes. Youtube import gives just 4 subscriptions while I have hundreds and so on.

Can you elaborate ont he crashes more? when i still had an android phone newpipe was the only app i actively enjoyed using because it was just reliable and simple. the only issues i ever had were the same everyone had when youtube broke the functionality and usually there was a dev build ready in a few hours with a patch and then a proper update pretty shortly after on the main app. but i never used it to sign in to youtube so might be a difference. i specifically chose newpipe because i didn’t need to deal with google’s nonsense when using it

I'm using an old version (2.5.2) and just opening a video will cause an error ("Sorry, something went wrong" banner) but the video still plays so I don't care. rarely the whole thing will crash, but I've only seen that after hours of abuse (hundreds of videos viewed/downloaded)

The only other problem I regularly see are queued downloads being suddenly/silently deleted which is frustrating because you have to try to remember what it was you'd queued up. Maybe that's been fixed already?

I had a lot more crashes until I started using the official newpipe repository. The fdroid version lags by a few days.

I think it should just be taken off fdroid.

I have had a lot of ui crashes unrelated to YouTube over the years. Perhaps similar to the f-droid client. Not enough that it's unusable, mostly, but enough to try to avoid it either by suffering through ads or using an alternative.

For example, this release fixes a foreground service crash that made background play unusable for me for a while.

after using piped and newpipe for 1.5+ years, it is not good enough to fully replace youtube app for me. although i believe it has been mostly on the server side and not as much on the client (besides random crashes that were happening when opening a "new" type of video in recent past). currently, most new videos of my subscriptions (manually added) do not show up on time. they often pop up in retrospect, maybe after another person has watched that video on the piped instance.

on ios yattee allows use of both invidious and piped instances and the difference in reliability is night and day between the two. i truly hope the project makes further strides in and achieve a stable experience.

every single newpipe problem is google actively breaking them.

every time it crashed failing to parse some video is even more reason to use it!

I mean, I'm sure there's also still plain old bugs from human error in there.

But yes, if it breaks on YT specifically it's almost always due to YT.

I used Newpipe first after degoogling, then switch to Libretube for the supposed privacy benefits. App looked a bit better too and crashed often, but way too often there were problems with connecting the Piped instances it was using for streaming and it was laggy and slowly. Newpipe, conversely, when it works, is fast. Sometimes it crashes repeatedly but the problems are usually resolved quickly. Streaming is good quality and fast.

Yt-dlp is still the gold standard, but in my experience newpipe's reliability has improved in the past year or two.

Gonna piggyback off this comment to say that although this sounds barely relevant (cli tool vs android app) at a glance, you can actually use both yt-dlp and mpv in termux for playing audio on android as well. If you throw a comment at the end of the mpv command with artist/song-name then it's very fast to find with the ctrl-r reverse shell history search. Arguably faster than opening Newpipe and checking your history or playlists. Speaking of playlists, you could have .m3u files of URLs for mpv to play in termux as well.

Did you send crash reports, report the problem with the missing subscriptions, maybe even have a go at finding the cause if you happen to be versed in the technology? I've never seen it crash [1] on any of my devices so I can add that piece of anecdata to yours. I'm not a heavy Newpipe user since I run my own Invidious instance which offers close to the same functionality (minus playing in the background since that needs to be implemented on the device while Invidious is a web service) but for those times I do use Newpipe it works well. On those odd instances it doesn't load the video the solution tends to be an upgrade away.

[1] as in 'the app crashes', not 'the video does not play', the former is a crash while the latter is an incompatibility with Youtube and tends to be solved by upgrading Newpipe.

I feel bad now for posting something negative, it's just a spontaneous report of me trying to use it. Since I've never successfully stepped over to using it and become a user, I don't report bugs either. I've simply been curious to try, but content with youtube (mobile web version)

It crashed multiple times daily when I tried it a few months back. Same thing on my partner's phone.

I really hope "Fix app not responding, background app crashes and issues with starting the player" actually addresses the issue. Getting an ANR popup and having to either dismiss it every 15 seconds or kill the app, search again for your video, and hope it doesn't happen again is a horrible experience.

The only other experience-breaking issue I ran into is lack of support for multiple language tracks, which also seems fixed :)

I've switched to it maybe two months ago and use it in foreground and background mode, tried pip mode once or twice. But I'm using it almost every day. I had maybe four or five crashes so far, nothing that comes even close to the annoyance of YouTube's ad rate nowadays.

Solid for me.

Also it's not just the ad rate but also the recommendation drek: it's hard to follow subscriptions even, in the yt app or Web client.

Why I cope with youtube: adblocker ensures no ads and addon enables background play. Firefox on Android.

I didn't really like having YouTube be just another tab in my browser on mobile, it seemed too clunky. So until I switched, I didn't want to bother with 3rd party apps, since the experience a few years ago was horrible (forgot which ones I tried though).

Also I had that little bit of respect to support creators by not blocking ads. But when there's two unskippable 15 second ads before a 7 second shitpost video, at some point enough is enough.

So while I mostly just switched because of the ads, what really was a huge improvement to me was how every time I tap a YouTube link now (messenger, browser, mail), I get a nice pop-up from NewPipe asking whether I want to play it right away in the app, play it right away but just audio in the background, or enqueue it (if something's already playing). It's a small detail but it's such an improvement over "just interrupt the current video without asking".

Newpipe is much nicer in interface than youtube in firefox

With the new version I think it's a contender. Now the playlists per channel are available, which is essential.

Start the app and play something through one bluetooth device. Pause, then connect to another bluetooth device. App won't play videos and bugs out.

So glad this finally adds support for the "Live" tab on channels!

I've recently started using [Grayjay](https://grayjay.app/). It's not open source, but it is source available and individuals are allowed to modify the code to their liking. I've found that it crashes more often than NewPipe, but the vastly expanded features, more frequent updates, and improved performance fetching subscriptions are all worth it imo.

I miss having an android phone for easy file system nav and NewPipe. I hate having to pay YT just for background playback

I assume you are using an iPhone now?

You could try e.g.: https://github.com/arichorn/uYouEnhanced + https://github.com/powenn/AltServer-Linux-PyScript (or alternatives)

I dislike that I have to sideload the app every week again or it stops working but better than nothing I guess.

Is anyone happy of newpipe on android tv ?

On my freebox mini 4k (french ISP box) experience does not improve over time, but I'll give a try on latest.

I have SmartTube on Android TV, been working perfectly over a year now.

I use NewPipe regularly but unfortunately many videos play.. .weird, either skipping frames or pausing for a few milliseconds and then going faster. I have a Pixel 6a so it's as stock Android as you can get without using an AOSP based ROM...

OTOH on the desktop Freetube is basically 10 times better than original Youtube under every aspect, and videos play perfectly. Kudos to Freetube.

Only use NewPipe for SoundCloud. Quite stable for that. For YouTube it's a waste of time, IMHO. Constantly breaking, IME. Command line utilties for interacting with YouTube I wrote for myself are much more stable and almost never break. (Maybe once every few years. And fixed the same day by me.)

100% of my youtube use on mobile is via newpipe and I love it. On the desktop it's all command line, but I can't agree that newpipe is a waste of time.

One of the features new pipe offers that I only started using is the ability to "subscribe" to channels. I never log into youtube, so subscriptions are client side only. They're basically just a list of bookmarks, but newpipe can also go out and pull down a listing of new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to and i can categorize those channels into groups. It's extremely useful!

Newpipe does occasionally stop working, but it's been many months since it last happened. When it does happen, it's never newpipe's fault. Blame google (who sometimes intentionally tries to break things), but when that happens the command line usually still works and updates are pretty fast.

My only complaint really is that sometimes new pipe will clear a long list of queued downloads. I'm not sure what triggers it, but it can be difficult to go back and track down what was queued up. For all I know, that's been fixed in this new update

"Newpipe does occasionally stop working, but..."

If I can write utilities that almost never stop working, and this is not difficult at all, then why should I tolerate that.

I just checked to see id SoundCloud is working and sure enough it isn't. This app like is not dependable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com