this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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Youtube just recently started giving me issues on Librewolf. I actually paid for Youtube Premium for quite a while, let it lapse a couple of months ago, and I've been just watching with the ad blocker on. Having to go back to running stuff through Google Chrome and watching ads made me want to research "how can I watch videos without Youtube being involved" for the first time.
Piped: piped.video Invidious: yewtu.be
Those would be good places to start, if you still want YouTube content without the YouTube front-end.
It might be a little surprising given what I literally just said, but I am not unreservedly in favor of just grabbing someone else's content from someone else's server and then playing it without the ads that pay for the hosting bills for the origin server.
I realize I'm probably in the minority in that, but I feel like a fully off-Youtube video hosting solution might be a better way.
I get what you’re saying, but the simple fact is that most of the content is on YouTube. An alternative would be better (and PeerTube might get there one day), but you’d be very limited in your choices if you avoided YT entirely. Also, I can’t personally feel too bad about “stealing” from YouTube.
In this case, the someone else is Alphabet megacorp. I wouldn't waste any concern on them. The content is still hosted by YouTube, just played through the invidious instance.
To do away with all those concerns, you could self-host invidious, or donate to the instance you choose to use if self-hosting is outside of your technical prowess. If you want to support certain creators, donate to them directly instead.
It really gets to be a lot of edge cases to keep track of nowadays though, am I the only one? I mean the collection of scripts I have to keep track of to keep everything running as normal feels like the beginning of a new operating system.
In hosting invidious or what? I've got it running pretty maintenance free in a docker LXC in Proxmox and use Twingate for access to it and everything else outside my home network. There was a learning curve to set up, but there's plenty of yt tutorials to guide you through.
Read that sentence back to yourself and tell me there isn't a lot to keep track of. Remember, this is specifically for solving 1 issue. Sysadmins and hard core masochists will learn every framework and take a scalpel to both software and hardware if needed, but that is not 99% of the world's demographic.
Am I am hard-core masochistic hobbyist system admin for hosting my own Internet on my server? /s
The struggle is real. You have to be 5 years old to keep up with this shit hahahahaha
Yes, it's a lot of words, but there's really nothing to keep track of after setup. I just go to my invidious ip rather than youtube.com and it works. There are very good tutorials available if you want to implement these solutions. That'd be a good first step rather than the 'I've tried nothing and am all out of ideas' approach.
Lord Invidious? TF is that, some Star Wars character?
well yeah, you should be familiar with the services you host, means you are competent with them, and are capable of fixing things when they explode.
I mean, would you rather have spent 50 hours learning and setting something up, becoming somewhat familiar with it, vs clicking a button and it runs. In the event that it explodes and you need to maintain something?
It's a price that's worth paying for, not to mention it's not like you've wasted that time. It's time that you can use to put into other things that will benefit your life. I am currently running about 4-5 services, aside from game servers, that directly benefit my life. Because i've taken the time to learn and understand that stuff. (all of which are free, and run on my own hardware)
Plus it gives me freedom, i'm confident and content that i could self host every service i would need to use, in the event i dont want to use outside services. It wouldn't be pleasant to learn and or setup, but i absolutely could.
Should, would, could. Do you know the difference between a prescriptive and a descriptive statement? Look, my point is- things are getting out of hand complicated, if you think they easy, then you already born into a framework. Know whadamsayn.
I just bought a Nebula subscription. I can’t say they’re a replacement for YT, but they have good content.
Yeah, I was gonna say something about Nebula / Curiositystream. I actually think that that + somewhere to play music would take care of 95% of what I use Youtube for.
I think that's a very valid point, because that's literally what Google does with AMP links...
Haha that's actually a really good point
being a yt-dlp user myself, who runs a media server for mostly YT content.
I can say that google deserves it. They store like 2-3x the amount of data that they need to be storing per video. 11 files for a single video 1080p to 4k. All different bitrates, some barely different than any others. (i realize it's for codec support, but like, seriously?)
especially when they run predatory ads, force services into youtube premium that you don't want, just generally do not respect the creator base and certainly not the viewer base. Honestly i think google deserves to lose money right now.
Google is the 4th richest company in the world... Besides they don't deserve a dime from you, fuck them.
It's not about them; it's about me. They'll be fine whatever any of us does, yes.
Check if any of your favorite channels are on Nebula. If so, maybe there are other channels worth watching.
When I realized that, I’ve severely reduced my YouTube time. Actually, now it’s split among Nebula, Odsee, YT etc.
is it just me or 3rd party instances really so slow thats unwatchable?
There are other instances for both piped and invidious aside from the ones linked above. I believe the intended usage involves you finding the instance closest to you in terms of network, which may not be those specific instances linked above.
Yew a kind of coniferous tree which has red, berry-ike fruits, most parts of which are highly poisonous.
no issue with firefox and ublock origin just yet over here
Yeah, it seems like it's intermittent. Like there's either an arms race going on between uBlock and Youtube system, or else maybe they're slowly experimenting with the noose to see at what point and with what effectiveness the consumer parts of the equation will start choking up money again.
YouTube has been blocking me for a couple of months now, with one or two short breaks. I have Firefox and uBlock Origin. Even after I whitelisted YouTube, the blocking continues.
It seems that a lot of folk have wildly different experiences on wild variety of browsers and hardware. I use Mullvad VPN and I think their new DNS blockers seem to eradicate advertisements even on Spotify Free. I also don't think Google made the adblock rollout global, but did if for whatever subsections of the network. Looks like they've backed off for now, even, no doubt a time out to calibrate the evil cheater detecting algos...
A super lightweight option for viewing videos that I don't see mentioned often is drag and dropping the link into MPV.
Is this a thing???
I mean, give it a try. Easiest way is to just open a new mpv window and drag from the url bar into it. There's also a lua script that allows mpv to still make use of sponsorblock, but I haven't ever tried it. Youtube-DL is part of a standard mpv install unless you disabled it.
You can also just mpv 'youtubeurl' from terminal.
I also recently discovered
mpv --no-video [url]. Useful for when I just want to listen to a podcast or something. Sadly, I can't get it to work with SpotifyFreetube
What problems are you facing?
Switch on advanced mode in uBlock Origin, disable everything from third parties on youtube.com, then selectively enable the script for youtube's content server and a couple more that I don't remember.
You'll never see advertisements and issues with playback again
It was just for one day, videos would hang forever when trying to load in Librewolf. From Chrome they played fine.
I may not want to invest all that much energy into the arms race game if it starts recurring; I may just switch to one of the let-us-steal-it-from-Youtube-for-you mirror services.
Or just wait a little while, purge the filter cache, update your filters, and try again.