I used a public instance of Piped for a while and thought about selfhosting it, but the installation process was incredibly hard, to the point of being obnoxious, and in the end, it didn’t even work. I liked the features I saw on the public instances and would like to revisit it some time. Until there I’m using Viewtube. Installation was a breeze and it looks pretty nice.

Do you have some other YT frontend that we could try, post it here and tell us how easy/difficult it is to run and your opinion about it.

  • Morethanevil
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    410 months ago

    Seems a better alternative frontend than invidious. I will check that. Thanks for sharing 🌞

  • Boabab
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    310 months ago

    I’ve been using yt-dpl + MPV + qutebrowser or ytfzf for a long time, but lately I’ve been using Freetube a lot on my desktop (which can also use MPV as an external player). Subscriptions are saved locally and can be exported in several formats. I occasionally export them, sync them over syncthing to my phone and import it on my yt apps on my phone. On my phone I mainly use Libretube, with NewPipe as a backup.

    • Anarch157aOP
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      210 months ago

      Those look nice. I don’t need a dedicated desktop client, since I always have Firefox open anyways, but I’ll give Libretube a try on my phone. Bonus, Libretube’s Mastodon account is on the same instance that I use :-)

    • @[email protected]
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      210 months ago

      Check out pipepipe, it’s a fork of newpipe with extra bug fixes. I’ve found it to be a lot more stable.

      • Boabab
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        110 months ago

        Sounds good, I will check it out! Thanks for sharing!

  • 👁️👄👁️
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    210 months ago

    I don’t see the point of having an alternative YouTube front end. I just run uBlock Origin with all the filters enabled. Who cares if Google sees your IP requesting a video, they already have it through various means lol.

    • tal
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      10 months ago

      I can’t speak as to why other people use their alternatives, but if you use mpv with yt-dlp like the guy above, and which I do – which isn’t really a full replacement for YouTube, just for part of it – then you can use stuff like deblocking, interpolating, deinterlacing filters, hardware decoding, etc. Lets me use my own keybindings to move around and such. Seeking happens instantly, without rebuffering time.

      Also means that your bandwidth isn’t a constraint on the resolution you use, since you aren’t streaming the content as you watch, though also means that you need to wait for the thing to download until you watch it.

      There, one is talking about the difference between streaming and watching a local video, and that mpv is a considerably more-powerful and better-performing video player than YouTube’s client is.

      I generally do it when I run into a long video or a series of videos that I know I’m going to want to probably watch.

      EDIT: It also looks, from this test video, like YouTube’s web client doesn’t have functioning vsync on my system, so I get tearing, whereas mpv does not have that issue. That being said, I’m using a new video card, and it’s possible that there’s a way to eliminate that in-browser, and it’s possible that someone else’s system may not run into that – I’m not using a compositor, which is somewhat unusual these days.

  • macallik
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    110 months ago

    I’m still using public instances for now. I started w/ Piped but the buffer speed was lacking for most of the instances I used. Switched to Invidious and the buffer speed as amazing, albeit a lot more error messages that Google is blocking an instance temporariliy

  • @[email protected]
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    110 months ago

    Rehike. It’s meant to be a re implementation of the older hitchhiker youtube layout that youtube had back between around 2015-2020. It doesn’t do anything for privacy but that’s not the point of it so I don’t mind. I’ve tried things like newpipe and invidious but youtube is around 90 percent of my media consumption so having my history, likes, playlists, and recommendations synced between all my devices is too much for me to give up.

  • @herrfrutti
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    110 months ago

    Invidius user here. But will check this out.

  • @gobbling871
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    010 months ago

    I’ve hosted invidious relatively easy for a while now. Simple UI and just works. If anyone needs my compose and config setup, reply and I’ll post it.

    • fatboy93
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      10 months ago

      It would be great if you can post the compose and comfigs!

      Are there any minimum requirements?

      • @gobbling871
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        110 months ago

        No minimum requirements. And here you go:

        #version: "3.8"
        services:
          invidious:
            image: quay.io/invidious/invidious:latest
            restart: unless-stopped
            security_opt:
              - no-new-privileges
            container_name: invidious
            stop_grace_period: 3s
            ports:
              - 127.0.0.1:3000:3000
            environment:
              INVIDIOUS_CONFIG: |
                db:
                  dbname: invidious
                  user: invidious
                  password: superstrongpassword491
                  host: postgres
                  port: 5432
                check_tables: true
                popular_enabled: true
                login_enabled: false
                statistics_enabled: true
                hsts: true
                hmac_key: *PICK-A-LONG-RANDOM-STRING*
                https_only: true
                external_port: 443
                use_quic: true
                database_url: postgres://invidious:superstrongpassword491@postgres/invidious?auth_methods=md5,scram-sha-256
                force_resolve: ipv4
                domain: *your.domain.com*
            healthcheck:
              test: wget -nv --tries=1 --spider http://127.0.0.1:3000/api/v1/comments/jNQXAC9IVRw || exit 1
              interval: 30s
              timeout: 5s
              retries: 2
            depends_on:
              - postgres
        
          postgres:
            image: postgres:15-alpine
            container_name: postgres
            security_opt:
              - no-new-privileges
            restart: always
            # purposefully excluded volumes section
            # the database will reset on recreate
            environment:
              POSTGRES_DB: invidious
              POSTGRES_USER: invidious
              POSTGRES_PASSWORD: superstrongpassword491
            healthcheck:
              test: pg_isready -U invidious -d invidious
              interval: 10s
              timeout: 5s
              retries: 5