Selfhosted @lemmy.world asbestos @lemmy.world 7d ago

What’s the newest way of watching YouTube?

As it stands, both Piped and Invidious are dead. Because od that, I almost completely stopped watching youtube but l'd still sometimes like to check what the people I follow posted (I used to do that via Piped). Are there any new ways of following people without actually using Google? I'm aware of the tools that download new videos as they come out but I'm more interested in just "subscribing", kinda like RSS?
Ideally it would be on iOS

Edit: I found it, “Unwatched” on iOS is awesome, thanks to !FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone

76 comments

Newpipe still works on Android.
- PipePipe has even more sources.
  
  I thought I was the only one.
  
  I like that pipepipe provides an option to use a Google account fall back for videos that are age verified, since those don't work anymore without an account.
  
  And they got a content filter update too so can block channels and keywords.
NewPipe or Patched YouTube App using ReVanced Manager
I just use Newpipe

However, Piped and Invidious are not dead. YouTube is trying really hard to kill them but they still work somewhat. It is a cat and mouse game.
- They're effectively dead. I haven't ever found a single instance that works for more than a few days in years, despite people constantly recommending them.
  
  Probably because people self-host them. I have an invidious instance self-hosted and use clipious on android to watch videos on it. Feels super modern and have pretty much no issues. Public instances usually don't work because of datacenter ips get blocked by YouTube.
yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all <url> is the way. It turns playlist link into nicely named, curated video files awaiting to played by a regular video player
- Does "all" remove every type of segment? Because that seems excessive for most people, there is a lot of filler/etc sections that are over-zealously tagged.
- That seems like it would screw the creators more than YouTube.
  
  Possibly, but for how ad laiden YT has become it’s a path I’m willing to take.
https://grayjay.app/
- "Absolutely proprietary"
  
  Yeah, but at least it's source available :P
  
  Non-commercial clause, for those who are curious.
- My only issue with Grayjay (both Android and Windows app), is you have to manually export the videos out of Grayjay
  
  If you try to grab the files directly, they don't work.
- It hasn't been working lately. Videos stop at 0:59
  
  That's a YouTube/VPN thing. Every other app is experiencing the same issue, in my experience.
  
  Hmm, I haven't had that issue
Grayjay by FUTO has been working well for me
- Forgot about that one but it’s only on Android (mobile-wise)
  
  Oh, I wasn't sure what platform you needed. For iOS, yeah I have no idea. For anyone else that comes across this though, Grayjay also has a desktop app now
- Grayjay started shitting the bed on me recently (Android via Samsung and Graphene, and on Desktop Linux/Windows) unless I disable vpn.
  
  Even with Agent andDNS whitelisting for the apps.
  
  A bit of a bummer after recently donating.
  
  That's not GrayJay. That's YT. They've started blocking access to users who use a VPN without logging in.
  
  God forbid they don't know everything about you.
  
  Edit: response from FUTO
  
  Seems to be related to UMP streams and we have issue opened for it and it's top priority for us to fix this now. It is however very complex so it takes time to fix it but at least we figured out why it is happening and once it is fixed it should be a smooth experience on Youtube at least for a while until they change something else on their backend...
FreeTube still works for my Linux system, for most videos.
- same
As others have said, invidious is not dead, and they're working on factoring out the part that interfaces with YouTube itself, so that updates to react to changes in YouTube will be able to be implemented much faster.
Self hosted Invidious still works
Freetube and mpv (uses yt-dlp in the background) work well for me 🤷

Anti Commercial-AI license
- I love freetube for my android and Linux PCs.
  
  Freetube works well on windows and macos too
I believe that YouTube supports RSS. I haven't used it in years, but gPodder allowed subscribing to channels.

Ah, yeah. From this post:

Go to the YouTube channel page.

Click more for the About box.

Scroll down to click Share channel. Choose Copy channel ID.

Get the feed from https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= plus that channel ID from the previous step.

From there, something (like a podcast client) needs to grab the video.

Otherwise, I've been using Tartube to download to my media server, which is not great but fine, except for needing to delete the lock file when it (or the computer) crashes, and the fact that the media server hasn't the foggiest idea of how to organize the "episodes."
- Thanks for this! It actually works with a regular RSS reader, nice!
My personal Invidious server works just fine.
I just use yt-dlp and VLC ¯\(ツ)/¯
i "subscribe" via rss in freshrss, just use the normal youtube.com on desktop and mobile browser. StoptheMadness on iOS to strip ads
Addressing the subscribing part; I had similar requirements, so I started subscribing via FreshRSS while using a custom theme to give it a YouTube-like experience.

I shared the setup a few month ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21381606

Edit: One of the benefits of using selfhosted RSS with a web interface is that it is platform agnostic.
- @lent9004 @asbestos Holy crap, that looks like an awesome way to use Fresh. Thanks for posting it.
  
  No worries! This setup ended up working better than I thought, and I've been using it as my primary way of interfacing with youtube.
Revanced and Firefox + uBlock Origin.

First one's hard to set up, but I'm sure anybody self-hosting literally anything could do it in two seconds.
I used NewPipe for a while, now I'm trying out a fork called PipePipe. https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
I was using freshrss which can grab the rad feed for a channel, but I’ve moved to tube archivist with a Jellyfin plugin. Now they are all predownloaded and just show up on my tv via Jellyfin app.

It’s a way better way to keep track of what you want to watch.
- Just curious if there's a setting in any of those applications that removes downloaded videos which have been watched at least once, and after x amount of time? It's sort of like a watch list. If watched, I don't want to keep the video. But if I do, I can add it to a playlist and let PinchFlat download it for archive.
  
  Deleting after x days is possible with Pinchflat, iirc.
https://github.com/alexta69/metube and Plex
I’m using News Explorer for my RSS feeds which also supports subscribing to YouTube channels. In the newer versions it even pulls the comments from YT.
Unwatched is great on ios.
- Whoa, this is it! This is what I’m looking for
- This is awesome, thank you!
- it's so pointless
  
  ? its pointless to watch videos without it being tracked to an account and with adds removed?
I am already paying for proton vpn for other reasons and connecting to other countries that don’t allow ads seems to work. It even works on NVIDIA media player and I might even assume Apple TV. I just lost my premium today so yeah

Edit. Just noticed this is a self hosted sub, I’ll just leave this in case someone needs the info but otherwise I’ll delete
- What countries might that be?
  
  Albania and Azerbaijan have worked for me.
  
  Less developed countries who need their bandwidth more than you or countries at war... so not really a good idea after all.
On iOS, I uninstalled the app and use Brave for YT & if I need to get on Reddit.
On my phone I still use LibreTube but with the option to load the video directly from YouTube (essentially doing what NewPipe is doing) and on PC I just use YouTube's directly. I still use Piped to keep my subscriptions synchronized tho.
Orion browser works fine for me on iOS
I was going to recommend android apps until I saw iOS. I don't know anyones that let you keep a local subscription like newpipe does without needing to sideload. So if there are I'd be interested.
Anything work for iOS? I was using a side loaded app but it recently stopped working.
- Brave.
- https://github.com/arichornlover/uYouEnhanced
  
  I’ve been running this for my whole family and friends for years at this point. Way better than any browser based solution.
piped.video still works for me: subscriptions, categories, comments. Watching is MPV

76 comments