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Comment by BadHumans | Hacker News Reader

Just use NewPipe. It's just a better Youtube client even if it had ads.

Seconding NewPipe. Though recently it's been unable to load comments and the error banner keeps popping up as a result (no comments may actually be a plus?)

I still use the regular Youtube app for shorts but NewPipe is definitely a better experience overall. My main gripes with the official Android Youtube client: - They made it so annoying to choose your video resolution (Seriously, who tested this and found it better than the old method?) - I can accept not being able to play in the background, but if you lock your screen while in fullscreen mode and then unlock it, there is a very noticeable lag before the app exits fullscreen mode, and in this period you cannot resume playback.

Youtube seems to be doing some A/B testing with the comment system which has made proxies like Invidious and yt-dlp/Newpipe unable to load comments. There is a patch for Invidious [1] which solves this problem but it is not in master yet. I tested it on my own instance and it does solve the problem.

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4576

For me, the less-complicated client called "DVD" is more reliable for downloading than the client called "Newpipe"; the later stops working intermittently. YMMV.

Neither are as reliable as using own custom command line programs on desktop, or mobile via Termux. If Google makes a change I can fix/workaround immediately. No waiting for app developers.

For me, Newpipe works well as a Soundcloud client.

From the Kotlin source for "dvd":

Video downloader app powered by yt-dlp (formerly youtube-dl).

Features

Download video/audio from 1000+ sites supported by yt-dlp.

Run custom yt-dlp commands.

Update yt-dlp version from settings.

Share link via other apps.

References

dvd - https://github.com/yausername/dvd

youtubedl-android - https://github.com/yausername/youtubedl-android

yt-dlp - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp (formerly youtube-dl - https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl)

I'm also quite a big fan of NewPipe. I just wish you could sort videos by views.

Equivalent on iOS?

Just hoping I’ll be able to use ublock origin on Firefox once it’s available on an I dependent App Store…

Not a direct equal but https://github.com/iv-org/invidious is nice

> Equivalent on iOS?

Try Yattee [1]

[1] https://github.com/yattee/yattee

I tried using it for a while, but it always took forever to start loading the videos. It was significantly slower to the point of being annoying. I gave up.

Though in some cases it may take little longer time, it is very rare that the video never loads.If an issue like that happens, you can submit a proper bug report in GitHub with details, or from their in-app bug reporting process.

I remember once that the video never loaded.I went to their gh repo to find that the issue is already known, there were some api changes from google side.

Worth trying again, I use it daily and have never experienced that.

Does it show the same video adds as YouTube?

There are no ads.

No, but this is entirely YouTube's fault as they don't offer any sort of API or method for third party apps to display ads.

I'm sure they don't out of concern about ad-fraud, but it would be funny if they had such an API, demanded third-parties used it, and didn't charge for/track those ad views.