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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

Delivering the bits is not the hard part of making a successful video platform. It's other stuff like recommendations and content discovery that is actually useful, allowing creators to monetize enough that they want to be on your platform, navigating legal issues, fighting spam and abuse, and getting enough users to sign up and start using your service.

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Delivering the bits is a part of it though. When youtube changes its api in a way that forces NewPipe to change its algorithm, they have to push out a change that forces users to update the app. This is annoying because naturally you won't find NewPipe on the app store so updating the app is tedious for users who use it. The parent's workaround fixes some or all of this nuisance, depending on how implemented

still less tedious than ads or no background play

I don't find ads tedious at all. In fact, since I grew up with ads on tv, I miss them. The commercial break was a scheduled time to get a snack, go to the bathroom, get a snack, etc. Today's platforms put the ad breaks in such awkward spots that doing those things is a lot less natural. IMO, it's not the ads that after the problem; it's the way they are used.

So you don't miss ads, you miss a scheduled break. You literally said you walk away when they happened, so you didn't even see them.

That's fine and there are tools to get that scheduled break back - even the official YouTube app has options to remind you to take a break every X min of watchtime and there are some very advanced general screentime limiting apps out there.

As you say YouTube ads aren't scheduled well and they're too short and unpredictable to even go to the bathroom during. Integrated ad reads are even worse in that regard.

This is a problem that can be solved by just pressing pause, you don't need ads for this.

You bring your phone or tablet to the bathroom, or are you playing YouTube on an unmovable TV set?

I did without a TV set since I moved in a larger home. Previously I could listen to the TV anywhere in my home, now I can't so instead of pinning me in a place I moved my TV into my phone and tablets. Everything is in an app anyway and for free to air TV I got a couple of RPi 3 with a TV hat and the TVHeadend app.

And when I have guests everybody is watching something different on their phones most of the times.

But these days you just press pause when you feel like it, so you don't have to let someone else pick the moment for you.

There's an extension for Firefox enabling background play.

It not being on the app store doesn't meant that there can't be low friction updates. FFUpdater, for example, is plenty convenient.

Can't you just do "ota" updates like codepush used to do? ie shove a JavaScript asset with whatever is needed and allow the app to pull it at runtime?

Smarttube on Android TV just pulls its own APK so you just need to click Install after it downloads and opens it.

NewPipe dev here: We discussed something like this, but decided against “hot loadable code” like JavaScript snippets. Instead, we notify the users when a new version of the app is available. However, this features is opt-in due to privacy concerns. Maybe we should make it more obvious that this feature exists.

> This is annoying because naturally you won't find NewPipe on the app store so updating the app is tedious for users who use it.

F-droid enters the chat.

I checked right now: I installed both NewPipe and PipePipe from F-Droid but both apps notify me about new versions and I always download and install them from the notification message bypassing F-Droid.

NewPipe dev here. Just like @nijave said, we offer OTA updates. Apps in android are capable of updating themselves this is why we show notifications when a new update is available. However, due to privacy concerns this automatic update checking is an opt-in feature, which you will have to enable in the settings first.

Delivering the bits might not be hard. Storing the bits is hard. Or at least expensive.

You could have local caches of the users recently watched videos on their machines as available seeds. bittorrent now also supports http based init seeds so you could create torrents with a verified sha of a youtube mp4 downloaded once or something like that.

if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers

That works if you fix everything to a single quality and codec. YouTube videos tend to have something like 20+ variants that can get dynamically switched between while the video is playing (adaptive streaming).

The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.

I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.

SDR 1080p AV1 can handle 90% of YouTube views.

I'd be interested in seeing data that supports this.

Netflix reported in 2025 something like 30% of traffic was av1. I think smartphone and PC support are fairly robust but under the impression streaming devices are still quite terrible unless it's a Chromecast.

AVC/h.264 is the only thing I know of that's pretty much universally supported at this point. I found a Facebook/Meta report citing some consultant provided data that VP9 was a close second. Limiting to devices from the last few years, HEVC might work.

Okay I wasn't considering streaming devices. Those are going to have trouble participating in P2P at all but maybe they need something else.

You are correct, but in this scenario reducing the number of available qualities to cover the most reasonable use cases would be the right tradeoff.

Why is that the right tradeoff? It seems like the Plex/Jellyfin ecosystem has landed on keeping high quality persisted and hardware accelerated transcoding for everything else. Put another way, transcoding capable caches.

rabbit-holed onto MPEG-5 Part 2 LCEVC—Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding

Newpipe isn't trying to be a video platform

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