Every time I see an alt-client for Youtube, I feel like this is quickly becoming the BitTorrent vs. Legit DVD/BD game all over again. Here's the thing: I pay for Youtube Premium. Aside from web pages, I'd say it's the biggest non-interactive medium that I consume. And that said, the official Android client SUUUUUCCCKKKSS.<p>I don't care about blocking ads or downloads. I've already legitimately paid for those features. But I want screen rotation to not suck. I want comments to be easier to read. I want notifications and subscriptions to not be laundered by your shitty recommendation engine. And who the hell thought the Watch Later playlist should pop up/over when I try to play a video?! No one wants that.<p>I don't mind paying for what I use but I feel like a real sucker when I get a shittier experience compared to pirates.
Invidious is great! Google's/YouTube's heavy push to accept data collection pushed me to use Invidious full time with little regret*.<p>For those interested, you can use utilise Privacy Redirect (for Firefox[0] and Chrome[1]) to automatically redirect YouTube links to any Invidious instances. It also includes redirects for other OSS clients such as Nitter for Twitter, Bibliogram for Instagram, and others.<p>* The only issue I've had is that it sometimes refuses to play some videos because the media cannot be loaded. Not really sure why that is, but I'm willing to accept that over data collection.<p>[0] <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-redirect/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...</a>
Anybody using / looking for a heavy client (a desktop app) for Youtube?
I'm currently working on that in C++ (Qt). For now it's just small window presenting a searchbar, the list of search results and suggested videos. Playing the vid / playlist is done by opening a separate vlc window.
As a father of a three year old, invidious was a relief. He can now watch his 10Minute toons / day without all the other stuff and auto-continuation (that would turn on everytime after I disabled it). I self-hosted it through my own server, hosted at a remote site, through IPSEC, with 5000kbit upstream. Works with invidious!
Invidious is awesome, I use it for all of my youtube guilty-pleasure needs. I really wanted to help with the project when the original developer gave up and development stalled a little bit, but crystal is kind of an esoteric choice, while interesting in it's own right. Syntax looks simple enough but I didn't really "get" all the features and tooling based on the documentation available. I guess it doesn't help that messing with youtube is rather complicated when you can't use the API.
Invidious has been my primary way of using YouTube for over 2 years now (combined with an RSS reader to use as "subscriptions").<p>The official website is near-unusable in Safari and I dread clicking anywhere out of fear of causing a page reload/navigation and waiting for megabytes of JS to try to (poorly) reimplement existing browser behaviors.<p>Invidious is blazing-fast in comparison. The lack of ads, BS and dark patterns is also a nice bonus but the primary advantage for me is speed.
Having run both, I can recommend checking out Piped[0].
Crossover with the famous NewPipe Android app.<p>IME Piped recently works a lot more reliably with high-res videos compared to Invidious. If you ever have "media not available" etc. Both generally work fine with embeds, so you can use link rewriters in other alt-frontends (nitter/teddit/searx/etc) to have proxied embeds.<p>Piped can also be substituted for Invidious in Privacy Redirect.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped</a>
But, <a href="https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=x" rel="nofollow">https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=x</a> :<p><pre><code> As of September 1st 2020, invidio.us has closed down.
To see this content, please select another instance,
or visit directly on YouTube.</code></pre>
My YouTube usage is as follows. Open private Brave tab (prevents lots of tracking and all ads), search for a handful of channels, watch their new stuff, repeat in a day or two.<p>How would invidious improve or help with that workflow? Again I already use a private Brave tab to prevent tracking and ads.
I really like it. The UI is clean, but lately music videos won't play sometimes because "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or becase the format is not supported" (for example: <a href="https://yewtu.be/watch?v=3gy8hkVMqwQ" rel="nofollow">https://yewtu.be/watch?v=3gy8hkVMqwQ</a>), no matter what instance I try.<p>Not sure if it's my own web browser, but this was not happening before.
For all the greasemonkey heads out there: <a href="https://openuserjs.org/scripts/marcowahl/yt2invidious" rel="nofollow">https://openuserjs.org/scripts/marcowahl/yt2invidious</a> provides a button to conveniently switch from yt to invidious.
Does anyone know: Do tools like this bother the people who created Youtube in such a way that they feel sort of defeated? Or are tools like this welcomed. I don't imagine Invidious hurts their bottom line that much. In the end: it's just geeks having fun, right?
Wish YouTube could just nail a feature of preparing a temporary playlist, by allowing you to drag videos from a wall of new subscribed content & then play it without getting bounced off into auto-played recos.