this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Use Piped or Invidious, it also bypasses ads and tracking. It works best in combination with LibRedirect, which you can configure to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Piped or Invidious.
Freetube has been the biggest life improvement on how I consume YouTube. The fact that it gets better recommendations and I can list my subscriptions in an easy way, even import them is something I miss in all the rest of alternatives.
Between FreeTube and NewPipe, I haven't visited YouTube in about a year. It makes it a bit surreal when I see so many complaints about ads.
Then I use someone else's laptop or phone and see the amount of ads everywhere and how much time is taking away from them.
How can one put up with that..
I'd use FreeTube, but the quality was not as good as on YouTube itself, has that changed?
I don't know. For any given video? I've seen high res options, but TBH I don't watch much on YT - certainly not movies, or anything that'd really matter - and don't pay much attention to it.
It's free, if you want to check out how the current version works.
Yeah, just gave it a shot. I'm just too accustomed to YTs quality that the drop just isn't worth to me, at least while I'm still not ad-block blocked.
What's the drop in quality you see? Is there an example video? I can't detect a difference.
It only supports up to 1080p/60fps, most videos I watch these days have 1440p or more, so the increased bitrate immediately makes the videos look a lot more crisp. For just a side to side 1080p comparison, there isn't much difference, just some more artifacting on the edges of things (not really that noticable). Maybe due to the YT stream being VP9 and FreeTube AVC? I don't really know to be honest.
Oh, maybe that's it. I don't think I have any devices in the house capable of displaying more that 1080p, and I don't use YouTube for any content where that'd matter. That's interesting, though; I wonder if that's a limitation enforced by YT on third party apps.
The higher resolutions on YT have higher bitrate, so even on a 1080p screen the 1440p and 4K options look a LOT better.
Can I set this up so I can still browse my YouTube recommended and only redirect when I select the actual video?
You can exclude https://youtube.com/ in the LibRedirect settings. For some reason that doesn't seem to work though, but you can always click on the LibRedirect icon in the extension toolbar and hit 'Redirect to Original'. You can also set up a keybinding for that.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Bot, you are useless in this case
its trying its best.
Any difference between Piped and NewPipe?
NewPipe is an Android app that allows you to watch YouTube videos without ads or tracking. It exposes your IP to Google servers though. Piped consists of a web client and a backend server, it uses the NewPipeExtractor on the server to load the video as well as all the metadata from Google servers and then serves it to you through the web client. That way, you don't have to connect to Google, only the Piped server communicates with YouTube servers.