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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Spotifyno 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.
Freetube
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.