Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Does invidious proxy by default? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I began using invidious after every piped instances refused to play videos lately. But what I read from their docs is that my IP might get exposed to google servers while loading videos from invidious. I use rethink DNS app and in that I can see all the domains that are getting called by my browser.

I tested about five instances and none are calling googlevideo domain as mentioned in the doc. Are they proxying my requests by default or am I missing something?

No, I don't have the option proxy video turned on. I use yewtu.be as my main invidious instance.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I’m still quite new to this but it is my understanding that invidious does serve as a proxy IF you are using a public instance. This is, I believe, why many instances get hit by the “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot, this helps protect our community” error due to so much traffic from the instance IP.

If you’re hosting your own instance YouTube will be able to see your IP. Since while it’s technically proxying your video requests, it’s still on your network.

I’m new to invidious and networking stuff in general so if I’m wrong please correct me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

by default it doesn't proxy the video stream you are getting from YouTube. it just extract the link to that stream and sent it to your browser and then you browser plays that stream URL which points to google's server so google is able to see your IP address.

however there is an option called "DASH" if you enable this option the stream would be proxied by your invidious instances. this options is disabled on most of the public instances because of high bandwidth usage.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Ah I see! Thanks for the explainer, I see where I misunderstood it.

I thought invidious got the entire video stream and streamed it back to the viewer - not just the link to it. So even if YouTube sees the invidious instance ip as the one grabbing the link, it would still see your ip as the one actually watching the stream.

I guess the bot related error I mentioned comes from when the server tries to get the stream link.