Many YT privacy frontends are down it seems. YouTube is cracking down on these servers fast. Both Invidious and Piped services are not working now.
So how are you watching videos now? Just plain youtube[dot]com with unblock and VPN?
I feel like most have misunderstood the point of the question, they offer to use newpipe, yt-dlp and the like, but those aren’t private, they just allow you to watch without signing in, just as you could through the official website with maybe uBlock origin, you’re still exposing your IP.
The only fitting suggestion I saw is that of downloading from invidious through yt-dlp, which sounds pretty neat, I had no idea you could when the web frontend is apparently not workingYes I tried to using freetube with VPN this morning. I have to say… Its pretty good. But the catch is you have to use a vpn server that is not used by many.
Some invidious instances directly embeds the video from googlevideo[dot]com. This means google will get your IP. But in the setting you can choose an option to proxy the video for you.
I feel like most have misunderstood the point of the question, they offer to use newpipe, yt-dlp and the like, but those aren’t private, they just allow you to watch without signing in, just as you could through the official website with maybe uBlock origin, you’re still exposing your IP.
This implies invidious and piped hide your IP address, which I’m not sure is true.
Piped always does, it’s the way it works. Invidious is not always like that, at least if what is said in this issue is still true, it depends on the instance
thanks for the info
I download it with yt-dlp and watch it with a video player. that way they don’t know at what pace do I watch it (when do I rewind and pause, or speed up).
or grayjay when I remember that it exists.
other options for me include FreeTube and NewPipeOh yes. They don’t know the page… They do know what and what IP.
Searching Videos on FreeTube but watching these in the SMplayer, because FreeTube lists theVideos, but often don’t play it. SMplayer works almost always, Also possible open the Video copying the URL in it. Another possibility is searching the Video with Andisearch and watch it there in the search results sandboxed and anonym with the random proxies which use Andisearch.
Freetube and newpipe for me. However I will say they just don’t work sometimes. So then I just am left with my browser.
I wish we had some sort of way to copy videos from YT to PeerTube on some sort of on-demand way.
Like tell PeerTube the video you want, wait a few minutes, and then its available for everyone. Then it auto deletes after X days if it has had 0 views.
Edit: oh man, you could even have a Lemmy bot do this automatically when it sees a link to a YouTube video.
I download the videos I want to watch with yt-dlp. This applies to audio as well. I then add the videos to my Jellyfin server to watch them on the TV.
Vlc,potplayer, freetube
Downie.app (MacOS) and yt-dlp (multiplatform).
I am not watching YouTube content while these are blocked. I will not watch stupid ads. I will not submit to shitty platforms that suck. Until these work again, there is no YouTube.
I’m finding other ways to fill my free time during the holiday break. I’ll have a bevy of new content to watch when they’re updated.
On mobile, Firefox plus ublock works well. There are a few issues like losing your position if the page reloads, but it works pretty consistently otherwise.
I also use NewPipe, but Google breaks it fairly regularly.
Grayjay seems to be really stable compared to newpipe. I used it for 6 months now never break once. They also recently released a beta version for desktop which is quite promising
I pay a subscription to nebula and most of the creators i want are on there.
PipePipe on mobile works fine.
I use https://freetubeapp.io/
I personally think Freetube is the best for desktop right now. Recently, there is also grayjay for desktop. The UI is still buggy IMO, but also seem promising.
But GreyJay isn’t libre.
That is a fair point. Source first software isn’t a part of FLOSS, but even in worst case scenarios it still can be considered as “source available”. Which is better in term of transparency compared to closed source App. OP asked for “private” way to watch Youtube not open source way, so I think grayjay could still be a great choice. We are talking about watching from YouTube which is a corpo closed source spyware anyway.
but wait a second. Privacy is good because it is a Freedom. And because it make Freedom as a whole more possible. But using software with which you have no freedom, kind of defeats the purpose. Like you gain +1 freedom points and lose -1 freedom points. It’s net zero.
Transparency is good to see privacy, but if it is not Libre, you are not gaining any freedom.
I just woke up, I don’t know if I am making any sense
Tubular on on mobile and trying to find a Non Electron app for pc
New pipe android app. Been using it for years with no issues accessing YouTube.
FreeTube is a useful project as it allows you to “fallback” on a non-preferred frontend.
https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
This allows you to continue to use Youtube irregardless of which frontend is (potentially not) working.
In ‘Settings > General’ you’ll want to select “Invidious API” as your “Preferred API backend” and specify your favorite invidious instance in the “Current Invidious Instance” field and click “Set Current Instance as Default”. This locks FreeTube into the specified instance.
Then, when you notice that FreeTube is issuing notices to you about your favorite Invidious Instance being down, you can wander back to ‘Settings > General’; hit the “Clear Default Invidious Instance” Button and wait as FreeTube magically contacts the “https://api.invidious.io/” page for you and selects a new, and hopefully online and working Invidious instance. (You may have to hit this button several times to roll a working instance, Hit the button, check the subs page and see if everything loads, repeat if it falls back on the Local API.)
When you run into instances where you can’t roll up a good Invidious instance; the built in Local API is running a NewPipe Extractor like API directly from your FreeTube client. Not the best; but at least it keeps things working while you wait for the Invidious devs to fix things up; and it still reasonably preserves as much of your privacy as it can while doing this to the best effort it can.
…Sadly this doesn’t work when Google manages a double combo of breaking both Invidious and NewPipe; but I have found that this is less often the case and the devs of either project are usually fairly quick about getting fixes out. Bless their hard work with a donation sometime maybe, if you can.
