Invidious: An alternative front-end to YouTube

Every time I see an alt-client for Youtube, I feel like this is quickly becoming the BitTorrent vs. Legit DVD&#x2F;BD game all over again. Here&#x27;s the thing: I pay for Youtube Premium. Aside from web pages, I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s the biggest non-interactive medium that I consume. And that said, the official Android client SUUUUUCCCKKKSS.<p>I don&#x27;t care about blocking ads or downloads. I&#x27;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&#x2F;over when I try to play a video?! No one wants that.<p>I don&#x27;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&#x27;s&#x2F;YouTube&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m willing to accept that over data collection.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;privacy-redirect&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;privacy-redir...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;privacy-redirect&#x2F;pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;privacy-redirect&#x2F;p...</a>

Anybody using &#x2F; looking for a heavy client (a desktop app) for Youtube? I&#x27;m currently working on that in C++ (Qt). For now it&#x27;s just small window presenting a searchbar, the list of search results and suggested videos. Playing the vid &#x2F; 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 &#x2F; 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&#x27;s own right. Syntax looks simple enough but I didn&#x27;t really &quot;get&quot; all the features and tooling based on the documentation available. I guess it doesn&#x27;t help that messing with youtube is rather complicated when you can&#x27;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 &quot;subscriptions&quot;).<p>The official website is near-unusable in Safari and I dread clicking anywhere out of fear of causing a page reload&#x2F;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 &quot;media not available&quot; etc. Both generally work fine with embeds, so you can use link rewriters in other alt-frontends (nitter&#x2F;teddit&#x2F;searx&#x2F;etc) to have proxied embeds.<p>Piped can also be substituted for Invidious in Privacy Redirect.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TeamPiped&#x2F;Piped" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TeamPiped&#x2F;Piped</a>

I use Invidious with MPV and Piped (piped.kavin.rocks) in the browser. I find Invidious often doesn&#x27;t work and Piped doesn&#x27;t work with MPV.

But, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redirect.invidious.io&#x2F;watch?v=x" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redirect.invidious.io&#x2F;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&#x27;t play sometimes because &quot;The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or becase the format is not supported&quot; (for example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yewtu.be&#x2F;watch?v=3gy8hkVMqwQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yewtu.be&#x2F;watch?v=3gy8hkVMqwQ</a>), no matter what instance I try.<p>Not sure if it&#x27;s my own web browser, but this was not happening before.

How well does it work with subscriptions?

For all the greasemonkey heads out there: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openuserjs.org&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;marcowahl&#x2F;yt2invidious" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openuserjs.org&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;marcowahl&#x2F;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&#x27;t imagine Invidious hurts their bottom line that much. In the end: it&#x27;s just geeks having fun, right?

Does it not work for livestreams? I can&#x27;t watch any currently-airing channel I follow on it.

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 &amp; then play it without getting bounced off into auto-played recos.

I wish Invidious would allow more than 720p.

Is anyone aware of a comparable iOS app?