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Invidious is a good piped alternative for those starting to look at this space: https://invidious.io/

Yattee is a good front end app for both piped and invidious for Apple TV (and iOS and macOS but I prefer the browser on those platforms)

Invidious had its own big thread yesterday at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37900458

I have troubles understanding what's the value added by Yattee if it's only a "front end", while piped already claims it's a front end for YT. Can you help me get a clearer understanding ? I'm interested in ditching YT in favor of a privacy friendly / ad-free alternative.

Yattee aims to fit more in line as a native Apple subscription organizer and player application suite, with native window controls and tighter integrations, but it's mostly up to you to decide how'd you like your setup to be.

Ideally, you could self host only the Piped framework and connect this to Yattee without hosting the WebUI frontend, but without the latter, you cannot create a user for yourself to store subscriptions, and using the provided AIO Docker Images is overkill for self hosting as you are required to purchase and point to DNS records for this system (mostly to the benefit of publically hosting an instance of Piped). Invidious is more suited for this regard, but has issues with parsing some videos and their metadata (usually new uploads for a week, Vevo Music Videos etc.)

Related:

Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alternative front ends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881771 - Oct 2023 (128 comments)

Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667236 - Nov 2022 (120 comments)

LibreTube: Alternative YouTube front end for Android built with Piped - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30746420 - March 2022 (46 comments)

Piped: A privacy-friendly YouTube front end which is efficient by design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27869188 - July 2021 (230 comments)

Also check out a FOSS Android app LibreTube[1]. No ads, SponsorBlock, ReturnYouTubeDislike, can proxy all the videos through a Piped instance, subscription sync with a Piped account, offline and online playlists are supported

[1]: https://github.com/libre-tube/LibreTube

NewPipe+Sponsorblock is also nice. No logins.

You can use LibreTube without a Piped account as well - the subscriptions will be saved locally

What's different is that NewPipe connects to YouTube servers directy while LibreTube doesn't. Also, LT has MD3.

How do you get a YouTube video without connecting to YouTube?

Through Piped, which proxies all requests through it's server

How will tools like this persist after Google enforces WEI for people using youtube?

Considering how many viewers they have using televisions/set top boxes/streaming usb sticks that will never get an update, do you see that happening any time soon?

These won't be supported forever

Youtube wants to be a ubiquitous presence in modern culture, therefore it is in their interest to continue to support all the old and busted computers/etc that are still in common use. This includes allowing people to watch videos without an account using the old busted up computer they have in the back room at work, keeping youtube accessible on publicly shared IPs like libraries, coffee shops, even VPNs.

I believe they will be very reticent to cut off access to this long tail of users with outdated computers, with no account on shared IPs. As long as this is true, it will be possible to use youtube in contradiction to their TOS. They could lock things down quite tight overnight by requiring people to sign in and use up to date browsers/players, but doing so would threaten their ubiquity.

I would expect them to simply limit streaming quality without having an account to their standards. They tried locking 4K video behind a paywall before and people were upset, but locking it behind an account (plus WEI, but 99% of users won't know the difference) seems like it wouldn't cause outrage.

> but locking it behind an account (plus WEI, but 99% of users won't know the difference) seems like it wouldn't cause outrage.

You're probably right. For my part at least, 720p video from youtube almost always satisfies me (and leaves me with more battery life anyway.)

You'd be surprised, I had some old Symbian phone with some really ancient Youtube app and it still was working couple years ago. The phone's screen eventually died, so I can't check now

Wasn’t the Wii’s YT client infamously long lived?

June 2017 is when it ended

Likely by means of reverse-engineered APIs from smart TVs (or similar) with limited capability to provide integrity, although I'm sure there are steps Google can take to make that harder

Forgive my ignorance, but what is "WEI"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

> How will tools like this persist

They will not, that is the whole point of WEI.

They won't. That's the point.

Invidious is also a great frontend. From what I can tell, a lot lighter an simpler. From what I can tell, Piped also uses a custom fonts to render controls(?), so it doesn't work well with remote fonts disabled.

My go-to instance is: https://yewtu.be/

Occasionally it might be down, but it's easy to find others.

Piped also require JavaScript.

With a name like "Piped" I wonder if it's related to the NewPipe app, one of my favorite apps on Graphene OS and something that I really wish existed on iOS.

Piped is indeed 'related' to NewPipe: Both NewPipe and Piped use "NewPipe Extractor" to extract Video information (AFAIK including stream data) from streaming sites like YouTube.

I believe the main difference is that NewPipe is an Android App frontend and Piped is a web frontend with the Extractor library as a core dependency.

Which makes the NewPipe Extractor library a great starting point for building more, different frontend applications.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert and this is an oversimplified explanation.

Both are simply related to "tube" without having to use a word that would make them target of the youtube trademark holder.

At first glance I thought this would be an article about corporate HR's "Performance Improvement Plans"

Aren't these services (and even adblockers) against YouTube's TOS? As much as I don't like ads as the next person, my Google account is one thing I don't want to risk.

Anybody hear of this happening or think it's a possibility down the road?

Google can block you at any time for any reason. Terms of Service are never relevant. If you're doing something many other people do, you're okay.

Besides, suppose they do block you. What's the worst that going to happen? If you can think of something really bad (e.g. I'm going to lose all my photos) then you should do something to address that. Regardless.

Photos would be a one evening worth trivial task to back up to another system .

Switching your phone from android or changing an email address with hundreds of contacts over many years is far more difficult and expensive.

Google or Apple for that matter can make life difficult for a single person by banding their account , there is not a whole lot an average person can do to mitigate that risk.

This is why I use a separate throwaway account for Android and no longer use a Google account for anything else.

It doesn’t matter how many different accounts are used, google is known to ban related accounts as they see fit .

How they classify accounts being related is anyone’s guess .

> Aren't these services (and even adblockers) against YouTube's TOS?

It's probably a grey area. It's hard to claim that I'm acting against YouTube's TOS by using Piped. Aside from the fact that I haven't agreed to them, I'm also not interacting with YouTube.

As for the devs: they're merely writing a proxy. I'm sure some creative lawyer can find a way to portrait this as illegal, but it's likely a stretch.

The game is rigged, so you should stop caring about the rules.

Also, don't associate your google account with your youtube usage. Problem solved.

This is my question too. If I am going to risk my Google Account getting banned, there is no way I want to try something like this. If it is actually explicitly allowed, then sure I will use it.

I don't think it allows you to login with your Google account. You can have a local account on the instance but it does not have anything with your google account.

So you cannot interact with videos (comment, like..etc) although you can create Playlists that will be linked to your local instance account.

How would your Google account be linked to piped usage?

I can't speak for piped, but I use a self-hosted Invidious instance to watch Youtube. You don't log into it with your Google account, it has its own authentication so that it can save your (distinct) subscriptions. Even if Google decided to crack down on alternate front-end usage, they can't correlate it back to your actual account.

> they can't correlate it back to your actual account.

Can't is a strong word. They might not bother, but if you're logged in to your Google account on other services from the same IP they might tie those together. Wouldn't be 100% accurate but if they decided to go nuclear ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If this is truly frightening, you should reduce your reliance on Google since too much of your life is tied with them.

I use the SmartTube frontend on my TV and do not have it linked to my Google account for exactly this reason. I just leave it set as the default user. Yes, it's a bit of a pain if I find a channel that I would like to subscribe to, that I need to do it twice (once on the TV, once in YT on my phone), but that's a very hurdle.

I recommend having a separate account where important data is stored (Gmail, photos) and another for everything else (search, youtube, hangouts, etc.). I also still keep personal backups of all import data (see takeout.google.com).

Since they have started blocking invidious instances, I've switched to the Freetube app as a YT client. Work great imo & no dependence on external services/hosts. Hopefully they are not plannign on enforcing WEI soon..

That is the FOSS front end I use for yt and it has been ultra stable I highly recommend it :)

I want a frontend where I control suggestions. If I'm watching something where I want more of that topic, I would then click 'suggest more like this' if I don't and it's just some stupid one-off video it won't suggest similar going forward.

Do any alt-frontends have that functionality?

If this is too off-topic please just ignore it (and don't DV).

I want to embed YT videos on a website, but we would like them to be as private as possible. For example, DDG has a player which shields the watcher from YT's data hoovering.

Any suggestions? Perhaps the search terms I'm using are wrong?

You can embed videos from an Invidious instance instead; on a video's page[1] there's an "embed video" link[2] you can use. The instance can be one hosted by you if you don't trust public ones, and you probably want to enable proxying by default if you don't want your clients to stream the video directly from Google's servers. You can also use a browser extension like libredirect[3] to automatically replace YouTube embeds with Invidious ones while browsing the web.

[1]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=xzTH_ZqaFKI

[2]: https://yewtu.be/embed/xzTH_ZqaFKI

[3]: https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension

In that situation I’d favor self-hosting - it’s easy, friendlier for users, and unless you’re getting a huge amount of traffic not very expensive. Swimming upstream against YouTube’s business model is just locking in time spent worrying about what you missed.

Hi, you can embed it using simple HTML! For example, you can try this: <iframe src="https://piped.video/embed/jNQXAC9IVRw" />

Peertube lets you host them yourself.

How long until YouTube figures out how to block all of this stuff like Piped and Invidious etc.?

I feel like a better answer would be alternative platforms.

The unfortunate answer is that it’s coming, and in the form of the Web Environment Integrity API, aka device attestation. If/when they manage to deploy this to enough devices, they will be able to restrict viewing to only allow ”blessed” clients. It needs hardware-level support, and that has been rolling out for maybe 10+ years now in the form of TPM modules and such.

The future they’re aiming for is that unless you’re using an approved (unmodified) browser on an approved (unmodified) device, you get nothing. It would basically turn large swaths of the internet into a walled garden overnight.

I don't know how much sway it has in this but didn't the W3C signal opposition to the WEI effort? And it's possible the antitrust lawsuits will have more influence on their audacity in this matter.

impossible without also blocking end users or requiring premium. even if they required a login, the video can be scraped.

They have been working towards requiring chrome, but that won’t work unless they close source it and lock down developer tools and apis, which would be a death sentence for chrome.

Fully agreed.

While I applaud the effort of making YouTube less hostile and invasive, the only real solution is to stop using it.

But then I know people want to have their cake and eat it too - let Google pay for all the hosting and bandwidth but want to use alternative clients

When WEI rolls out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity reply

It would mean blocking the billions of embedded YouTube videos scattered across the world in websites and emails and apps. It would be a catastrophic own-goal. That said, there are still many ways for them to enshittify their service. I worry that in the next few years they’re going to start splicing ads mid-stream. That’s much harder to block.

Every time I try to go to a Piped instance, it fails to load the video. Updates/quotas are even worse than Nitter instances, I think.

I recently learned about Piped - liked it so much that I've made an iOS shortcut [1] that replaces YouTube URLs with piped.video

edit: iCloud link

[1] https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d8ee1ef618da423e889272f9c0f...

I have to say that the crypto space is doomed and nobody cares about decentralization, but the technology behind it enables doing exactly this: 1 backend and many different clients. IMO this is the future - breaking monopolies with separation of powers a la John Locke

How is this related to crypto currencies in any way?

Any web API can allow multiple clients so I'm a bit lost at why you're so excited about this.

Let's see:

   - Youtube Premium: 11.99€/month
   - Spotify: 10.99€/month
   - Netflix: 15.99€/month
   - DAZN: 29.99€/month

Germany has this "TV tax" (I think the UK as well) which they charge you 18€/month supposedly to help with the production of the public broadcasting networks. I'd really wish we could turn this into a public fund where we can choose who gets to receive the contribution. It would basically destroy all middlemen in both the private and public sectors.

With second hand parts, I managed £300.

People care about decentralization, they don't care about projects that are thinly veiled attempts at extracting money from them under the promise of decentralization

I agree with the sentiment, but "people care about decentralization" is very debatable IMO. Most people don't care, they just want the content.

https://help.odysee.tv/category-basics/whatisodysee/

I think what you are trying to get into is decentralized technologies.

Hosting videos on the web is already "decentralized". You could start your own privacy preserving hosting service tomorrow if you want to. That still leaves the problem of how people can discover you service, yes, but how does crypto solve that?

When you desperately want your hammer to be valid and worthwhile, everything becomes a nail.

the problems people have with crypto does not include 'decentralization'

I was just thinking yesterday that there needs to be a 3rd party tool that reintroduces the thumbs down button.

There is, at least on browsers. I use the Return YouTube Dislike extension on Chrome.

https://returnyoutubedislike.com/install

there are a few projects that do this, but it doesn't really matter... not enough people use any single one and most new videos will never really show accurate info

I tried a few of the servers, the pages load very quickly, search is fast etc. But when I click on the play arrow, a long time elapsed before the video starts. Is this expected? (is this because ads are being skipped in the background)?

The privacy argument is extremely important, also in regards to avoiding tracking via ads, but I do not think bypassing or blocking ads is the way forward. In the free democratic world, we really should aim to do better than this, and instead try to actually develop privacy respecting alternatives that is not going to undermine the internet, further empower the big players, or hurt website owners unnecessarily – including Google/YouTube.

The obvious problem with such tools is that it may allow bypassing YouTube's ad-wall, and as a website owner I can see why that is problematic. It is bad enough that local GDPR interpretations can practically prevent website owners from monetizing their websites via interest based ads.

For YouTube it probably does not matter as much it would to smaller sites and bloggers, but it is still a violation of their TOS. So, if you want ad-free, consider simply paying.

Besides, I am personally not too worried what Google might be using my data for. Thankfully, Google is owned by a US-based company – I would be more worried if the company was placed in China, Russia, or any other country that does not care about freedom rights at all.

Of course, there is always the risk of data-leaks, and that's a valid point – but then why do we tolerate that the government has data on us!? That's even worse than a company tracking us!!

The issue with YouTube isn’t the ads, it is the number and length of ads combined with a monthly premium option that is far too expensive for what it offers.

You may make the argument that YouTube includes music, but the quality and capabilities of the platform are very poor compared to competitors.

$5/mo is about the most I would ever pay.

idk, I have been using youtube music and it doesn't seem way worse than spotify. Maybe we use it differently.

There already is an alternative to youtube. Peertube https://joinpeertube.org/

The problem is most content creators are only publishing on YouTube, so that is where you have to go. If you are a content creator please publish on peertube so we have options. If you know a creator, likewise encourage them to publish there.

Content creators (the ones that we actually hear about and make money off Youtube) are too addicted to the algorithm to even consider dropping Youtube. At most you'll find some of them hedging a bit and joining something like Nebula or Floatplane

I believe that we will have to adopt some guerrilla tactics to win this war: we need to make it clear to creators that they won't make any money if they continue using Youtube. More people using frontends is a start, making Sponsorblock a feature even better, and I'd say that we should even have to run some pirate Peertube instances to copy the content away.

Many of the good ones don't have much audience

And if they are really good and expect to grow, they will stick to youtube because that's where their potential audience is. :(

Which is why i'm encouraging breaking the cycle. Get enough content there and viewers will follow.

Blocking ads is also a perfect example of a Kantian non-universalizable maxim.

I often consider Kant's first formulation of the Categorical Imperative as a moral guide.

Internally I paraphrase it as: if everyone does this [action that I intend to do] will it be a good thing. I notionally insert "[everyone] who would wish to".

This situation is like the 'desire path' situation where an authority has imposed a pathway, but many pedestrians choose a different path because that is more useful. Ultimately the unpaved walking route will ride, and could cause a quagmire to form (in UK); should one then take the less practical, imposed, paved walkway?

I think the same conclusion forms for me. No. Because eventually the lack of utility in the imposed pathway will be made clear, and then the flaw will be designed around and utility will be increased.

Some might see this as shortcutting (ha!) the categorical imperative...

So yes, video sharing services need to be financed. But this doesn't mean we just roll over and accept alterations to the fundamentals of the web that make it worse.

Ultimately, my connection is that the whole system of brainwashing (advertising) people to increase consumption, or redirect consumption according to other characteristics besides thrift|utility, is detrimental to humanity (and the Earth) and needs to be done away with.

> So yes, video sharing services need to be financed.

I'm entirely unconvinced that even this is true. Today's platforms and software are built around control and centralization, which is indeed expensive. But there's an obvious alternate path. Instead of preventing users from downloading media, embrace it. Build ipfs into browsers. Link to videos on ipfs. Add a "pin" menu item right on the browser UI for videos/images so that users can easily save copies of what they like and help serve it. Make it so you can subscribe to a channel by pinning an ipns name so you automatically download and seed new videos you're interested in. Let people pin to their (paid) cloud storage too.

There's a huge design space here. Expensive centralization is a tiny fraction of what's possible.

I don't think Kant, or any reasonable philosopher, would consider blocking ads a moral dilemma, which is the precondition of a maxim.

Blocking harmful, manipulative, inappropriate advertisements on my childrens' (supervised) use of YouTube is the most moral thing I can do today.

A moral dilemma is not a precondition of a maxim.

> I do not think bypassing or blocking ads is the way forward. In the free democratic world...

Ads are psychological warfare against the human mind. Advertising campaigns are designed/directed by unscrupulous mercenaries trained in the latest psychology, willing to use every manipulative technique known to science to manipulate you on behalf of the highest bidder. This mass-manipulation undermines democracy and is broadly harmful to society in general.

I don't understand how piped can be at the same time

- legal

- not use YT APIs

- ad-free

can someone help me understand how this works?

how many youtube alternative frontends are there?

A few.

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#youtube

I am a paying YT Premium customer and am honestly deeply frustrated by their child proofing controls. The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.”

The sudden interest/surge in custom YT frontends has inspired me to build a custom TV app with tighter controls.

Does anyone know how they work? Are they using YouTube private API directly, or running a full blown shadow browser and siphoning data into the custom front-end?

Update: edited for clarity

I uninstalled TikTok because it turned into a time-wasting attention sink.

I'm fine with YouTube proper, but YouTube Shorts is essentially TikTok in a trenchcoat.

There really, really, really needs to be a way to banish YouTube Shorts in your settings, because for me the alternative is uninstalling YouTube.

Yup, I've written about this a couple times[0], I cancelled my YouTube Premium subscription—I was otherwise a happy customer!—and switched to NewPipe on Android because I couldn't turn off YouTube Shorts.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36593028

>the alternative is uninstalling YouTube

I assume you're an iPhone user. In Android we don't even have that alternative (at least not out-of-the-box)

You can disable the YT app on Android. The effect is the same as uninstalling the app. YT links open in the browser, the app tile doesn't show up in the Apps menu. This is what I ended up doing to get over my YT Shorts addiction

I'll be damn. Thanks!

You can block shorts on the web with this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-short...

Alternatively, you can change shorts into regular youtube format:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...

I hate YT Shorts with a passion. But, I understand that I'm not the typical YT consumer. I use it as a tool for learning and not consuming.

You can banish YT shorts by clicking the X in the top right corner of the shorts row.

And yeah they’re pretty stupid. YT took a bunch of normal videos and cropped them to phone camera dimensions, lol. You can click the author’s name to find the original in their YT page. It’s just idiotic.

They have disabled that x in my region. I can’t even turn them off temporarily anymore. They are probably rolling out the change in stages to see how much angry feedback they get and how many people cancel.

I've seen the same thing - it's really tawdry and desperate, isn't it?

As I'm running an ad blocker anyway, I created a custom block rule to remove it.

I can't wait for the DMA to come into effect in the EU. I want to install a third party YouTube frontend with SponsorBlock and no shorts.

It comes back for me. Super annoying

You could start by taking a look at the base library that powers NewPipe and Piped called NewPipe Extractor [0][1]. It can extract the information you need from YouTube without using the API, I believe that includes access to the video streams themselves. Otherwise you could try and use Invidious through the developer API [2] although I must admit I have zero idea how good it is.

[0]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor

[1]: https://teamnewpipe.github.io/documentation/

[2]: https://docs.invidious.io/api/

I use LibreTube[0] on my phone which is a client for Piped so you can probably make your TV App a client as well so you don't have to do the scraping yourself.

[0] https://github.com/libre-tube/LibreTube

Web scraping [0] and grabbing the googlevideo stream from there [1], at least in the case of invidious

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious

[1] https://docs.invidious.io/faq/#q-what-data-is-shared-with-yo...

Piped uses a proxy server so that no direct connection is made between the client and Google's servers, for added privacy from Google.

> The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.”

This sort of thing is exactly why I roll my eyes when somebody suggests that it's the sole responsibility of parents to control what their children see online, and that anybody who complains about the state of things is just an irresponsible parent. The nature of tech products conspires to make this virtually impossible for all but perhaps an elite minority of technically inclined parents.. and probably still impossible even for them. Even the simple option of "no computers / internet in this household" is undermined by schools which give kids computers with leaky content blocking and require families to accept this.

I'll take your strawman and raise you one. This sort of thing is exactly why I roll my eyes when somebody suggests that it's a lost cause so you need to give your one-year-old a smartphone.

Just don't give your kid a phone. If he views content he's not supposed to at school or a friend's house, that's not the worst thing in the world. I can't possibly control every single thing my daughter does because she is her own person. But I can mostly control what she does in our home, and no smartphone is a simple solution that prevents all of these other content-blocking problems. Even if she figures out a temporary way to get around it, that's not the end of the world to me. The larger issue to me is the constant oppressive force destroying a child's brain by having TikTok in her pocket at all times.

What are they going to be watching if you don't restrict them, and what will it do to them? Why not just talk about it with them?

I find that YouTubes recommendation algorithm is not great. It would be a cool feature to be able to something like assume a persona and have recommended videos that similar like minded people watched. There's effectively infinite videos on YouTube but it's common I can go there looking for a video and find nothing interesting to watch. In some cases it's pushing recommendations for videos all similar to a recent video I had watched, but I'm no longer interested in that topic

I have started to click "don't recommend this channel" quite a bit on YouTube shorts and I am finding it is recommending me more channels like the one that I just said I would never like to see again...

"Don't recommend this channel" flat out stopped working for me a couple weeks ago but I used to use it all the time.

The best part is, every so often they show up with "want to watch something different?" which seems to be a list of everything I explicitly said I don't want to watch.

To be fair, that has a twisted logic to it. Videos you have no interest in watching definitely qualify as "something different" compared to ones you do watch.

My favourite is when you did click don't recommend channel it sometimes still comes back after a year or two like a bad relationship on Facebook. I try and maintain a few browsers with different recommendations streams and it's always wild when I have a new PC and I get some really toxic recommendations.

Skip that button and use BlockTube to blacklist channels instead.

> In some cases it's pushing recommendations for videos all similar to a recent video I had watched, but I'm no longer interested in that topic

If it has already showed you your organic recommendations multiple times before, it knows it needs to grab onto something new to try to get you to watching. Since you watched that recent video, that's the best chance it has of getting you to click anything since you've shown direct interest in it. You can click 'not interested' on these and it's pretty good at following that instruction, at least unless your next video is another video similar to it.

To add to this... maybe YouTube could build a concept of bring your own algorithm or "curators" where I can follow a curator who either manually, or by using their own algorithm creates their own unique feed that I might enjoy more than YouTubes default. Maybe kind of like a spotify playlist or something. The curators could get a small piece of the ad revenue from videos they recommend as a sort of referral fee. This could also probably be done by an external service like a Piped, but they could instead just show their own ads instead of getting the referral fees.

I must be in the minority here, but I feel YouTube provides enough value that it's worth paying for to get rid of ads.

Only Docker, again.

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