What does ad-free mean?
Arent ads embedded in the youtube videos itself such that when you play a long video, multiple ads show up in the beginning, middle and end of the video ?
No. The ads are separate video files that get played after each other by the browser or youtube app. Since this app is complete independent it just choose to not play the video ads
I hadn't seen a Youtube ad in years, but now Youtube gives "An error occurred. Please try again later." on first load in Safari on a Mac with Wipr. Reloading without blockers gives ads before and every few minutes and some overlays. Miserable.
It's still easy to work around, but maybe Google's getting more aggressive about blockers.
A tinfoil hat theory I heard is that's the reason they want to push QUIC -- to give them more signals for blocking people with ad blockers.
Not that I believe it, but fighting ad blockers in general is a losing battle in my opinion, eventually you will just end up blocking too many eyeballs, and your ad revenue will drop.
uBlock Origin in Firefox still successfully blocks all ads. Also, youtube-dl continues to work and doesn't download the ads, so media players like mpv can play youtube videos and will never show an ad.
In an app's context, I think it means _additional_ ads. In this case though, since on YouTube the ads are not baked into the original video, it also means that you get to watch the content without these ads that are represented by a yellow bar on YouTube.
This remains a killer app for me on Android. I don't know if anything equivalent exists on iOS, to enable background playing and video downloads (and you can choose whether to download them as audio files).
With iOS Safari you can change the YouTube website setting to always request the desktop site. Then if you press the home button while a video is playing, pull up control center within 5 seconds and press play you have background playback.
There is also a ton of ad blockers for Safari which block YouTube ads.
I'm not sure that Apple would ban it. Do they really care if people bypass YouTube's intended restrictions? Obviously Google cares, so you won't be seeing NewPipe on the Play Store.
Musi does work well for playing music in the background on iOS.
A downside to Musi is that after playing a video a full screen ad will often pop up in a way that feels invasive and can be difficult to avoid inadvertently clicking. The behavior feels like malware, which leaves me concerned that the developers behind the app might hold flexible ethics and engage in practices such as covertly monetizing user data.
Nit: Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Is this an attempt to mimic how you speak aloud?
>Consider the Official YouTube app, with a paid YouTube Premium subscription.
That is definitely an option, but people who use things like youtube-dl or apps like NewPipe probably aren't in the target audience for YouTube Premium.
>Videos with still images (many songs) shouldn't be much data at all over the audio alone.
Part of the point is if you never intend to watch the content, but only want to listen to it, there's no point to having video.
> Is this an attempt to mimic how you speak aloud?
Of course.
> ...probably aren't in the target audience for YouTube Premium.
True. It's unclear if OP fits that description though. Re-read OP's comment.
> ...there's no point to having video.
Agreed. I think it most cases, there is no video for still image YouTube content. Just, you know, a still image. I don't know the extent this is true, nor do I know OP's use case. Assuming that OP is interested in music, the video component shouldn't be a real issue.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6007071?hl=en
That was my assumption. Things like "um" and "uh" tend to be silence-fillers, among other things (see below). It's weird to see them being typed-out, and I've noted an uptick in how often I see it being done.
> I've noted an uptick in how often I see it being done
Yep.
There's something about internet culture that rots our ability to have conversations with others. It's something I've also noticed in myself (it's easy to complain about everyone else) as someone who, sheepishly, has snuck in a juvenile "Um..." when I think I've really got'em good.
I suspect the uptick in just this sort of rot going mainstream. Like instead of bringing your in-person social skills online when the internet was newer, and then becoming corrupted over time, people are just born into the rot from a young age.
And frankly it takes eternal vigilance to stay a noncombative and fair online.
i was once told vision impared people can do much faster than that if it's a flat computerised voice. so i started reading articles like that for a while. i had to do a bunch of manual/automatic handling, but i got it up to super fast speeds and i could read it thrice in less than the time it took to read it once. not bad!
I don't know what all NewPipe or Vanced can do, and I don't know what all YouTube's apps can do. I mostly indicated that OP's desired features were covered by the official app (without possibly downloading the audio track from a video file). I'm certainly not making an argument that NewPipe is any better or worse.
You mean "expose the user to emotional manipulation through ads. That is not a feature, unless it's opt-in. A donation button or something like that would be.
You opt-in when you decide you want to consume content made with effort by the creator and hosted with effort by youtube. In a lot of countries, you have an option to opt out of "emotional manupulation through ads" by subscribing to youtube premium.
I've used this from the start.
Btw you don't need to give your google account to use this in any way. It is a fully functional (better) youtube client.
Been using it for a while now and there's no need to log in with your account - in fact, you can't! You have to import subscriptions over, and easy to follow instructions to do this are provided. The only thing you can't to is comment, but for the few times I actually want to comment, its no hassle to go to the mobile website.
My only major complaint is that the colour of the seek bar is hard to see on black backgrounds.
To be fair, I do pay for subscriptions for a few YouTubers. Wintergatan in particular is excellent. Of course, many creatives are using Patreon and other external revenue sources and frankly that's wise, given YouTube's track record with unusual copyright strikes and other platform nonsense.
Even if I were to pay for Youtube Red, this application has a feature that I cannot get with the official app: a lack of dependence on the Google Play store and services. Since I run a build of Android that does not include those services, this app is wonderful to bridge the gap, as it performs much better than playing the videos directly in Firefox. That it happens to include a bunch of extra features the official app does not is just a bonus really.
This is actually the situation I'm in. Google Play Services are disabled on my device so I cannot use any YouTube premium features anyways.
If there was a way to pay for YouTube premium and make the money go to the creators I watch while using a FOSS client like NewPipe, I'd be willing to pay several more times the current price of YouTube premium for that.
I wonder why this is being downvoted - Google asks for subscription for features that this app hacks for free. In any other context this would be deemed unethical (or even piracy). E.g. think of an application that streams Apple Music without paying Apple or distributors of cracked apps with enabled in-app purchase features.
And yet the HN community happily endorses such apps when it comes to Google. I also wonder why moderators think that this is acceptable in terms of YouTube.
The big thing is that pirates would most likely not pay for the thing they are pirating if it was not available legally. This isn't by any means universal but take video games for example.
Developers have long since abandoned the concept of providing demos to "try the game" before you buy it. If I am thinking about buying a game but can't be convinced that I'll get my money's worth, I'll pirate the game. If I end up liking the game, I might as well buy it so that I can use online features, receive updates, and not have to worry with the crack causing weird bugs. In these cases, piracy has filled in the roll of demo software and provides a net positive for companies because any converts to paying customers would likely have never purchased the game had they not pirated it.
Alternatively, look at something like the anime fansub scene. Fansubs often have far better quality than anything you'll see coming from legitimate anime streaming services. I pay for anime streaming subscriptions but I can't count the number of times I've refused to watch something on the service due to how bad the subtitles were, torrented an actually good fansub, and then supported the series (not the streaming platform) through alternative means.
You also have the digital preservation aspect. Piracy is the reason most early console games are playable nowadays. Emulators aren't really legal and all of the published ROMs are very much pirated content but if they didn't exist, how many games would be either extraordinarily rare or lost to time by now. Same goes for music. What.cd was an incredible archive of music and it preserved tonnes of tracks from small now defunct bands throughout the start of the millennium. This is all content that would otherwise be lost to time if pirates hadn't preserved them due to their own motivations.
There's more on this out on the web. I read a really cool article about it a while back but I can't find it atm.
The difference here is that you’re not downloading a copy of a video from one private user to another. You’re downloading the video from Google, using Google’s bandwidth and their servers.
I don't think it is that simple. When it comes to not playing the ads, I agree that is a problem. When it comes to the features, I think it is different.
One of the features is background playback of audio from videos. On the desktop, that's a feature that exists thanks to your window manager. Is that unethical?
It isn't stealing to use another method to get a feature someone is selling you, any more than using a third party DVR is stealing from a company offering you one as part of a more expensive package.
They have implemented the feature independently, and are providing it as a way of doing the same thing as something YouTube is selling you, I don't see that as a problem.
(NewPipe also has features that YouTube's app just doesn't support at all, like higher speed playback than 2x).
That's not piracy. Youtube is sending you packets, out of their own choice. It's my own right to save those packets(without re-distributing) them and watch them in any form I like.
Playing in the background is not a "feature", it's a basic device capability, the fact that YouTube went out of their way to prevent it does not make it right, imagine if the browser client had stopped playing when you went out of focus - that'd be completely unacceptable. The fact that somehow this is accepted on smartphones probably says more about consumers lack of technological competence and awareness (and maybe historical reasons, as earlier versions of Android/iOS didn't have proper multi-tasking)
Under the heading, "Permissions and Restrictions":
> The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:
> 1. access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders;
> 2. circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;
> 3. access the Service using any automated means (such as robots, botnets or scrapers) except (a) in the case of public search engines, in accordance with YouTube’s robots.txt file; or (b) with YouTube’s prior written permission;
The users using 3rd party apps don't violate any of these terms (I'm sure you could argue it both ways depending on the specific legal terms depending on the context; IANAL). The app itself is probably violating some of these terms, but for the end users, they are not doing any of the things described, they are just using the app.
I think this is just one of those cases where copyright/IP law moves too slowly compared to the technology it tries to cover.
> They are "accessing ... part of the Service or Content [without being] expressly authorized."
Are they though? AFAIK, law is very pedantic, and technically speaking, a human is physically incapable of accessing Youtube; we use tools to do so. We use some kind of software to access youtube.com, in this case, we are using an app that accesses youtube.com and relays the content on that page back to us. Similar to say, using Chrome or Firefox to access youtube.com and relay the contents on the page back to us.
Note, the APP accesses youtube.com, not the user. The app is (potentially) in violation, the user using the app is not. In fact, the user may not even know that the app is actually accessing youtube. Again, IANAL and I'm sure this is argued both ways, but I'm just saying this is an interpretation of the terms.
I mean hey the NRA has argued this successfully about guns (or maybe their money argued it successfully) so why not? Lets start a rock lobby to allow more rock freedom
That's not what piracy means, and that's not how the law works. If I state that the terms of service of reading this comment are that you must hop on one leg for the rest of your life, and you continue to walk on two, you won't be violating any laws.
I didn't say you're violating laws (but you may well be violating DMCA sections), I said you're violating terms of service. The expectation could be that they halt your use of the service, block access to their other service, and may disable your account.
OP claimed, "It's my own right to save those packets(without re-distributing) them and watch them in any form I like." That is not accurate. He doesn't magically GAIN COPYRIGHT over content, just because he downloaded it. His use MAY be covered by Fair Use Laws, but it may also still be a violation of YouTube's Terms of Service.
Nowhere did I imply that I'd gain copyright over the content.
What's the difference between downloading and streaming a video? It's OK for the bytes to stay in main memory/network cache, but not in HDD? Would taking a memory dump of the RAM break their TOS?
Google is willfully sending the data. If they want stricter access controls it's their job to implement them. TOS isn't a binding contract since one side never gets a chance to negotiate terms.
Yes, and if they start identifying Google accounts that share the IP of a device violating YouTube TOS and disabling those accounts, some people will be very sad.
They should at least consider the possibility. Go in with open eyes, so to say.
> Yes, and if they start identifying Google accounts that share the IP of a device violating YouTube TOS and disabling those accounts, some people will be very sad.
If this happens, even more people will take their eggs out of Google's basket. I've already migrated my email to another provider and use Searx[1] for search.
If you do use it, please don't violate the TOS, because it increases the chances you'll screw it up for everyone else (me). People who violate TOS are why we can't have nice things.
Assuming this is true(that there's a clause against viewing YouTube with a third party client), then they're free to ban users like me from their service(and suffer the PR backlash),
that doesn't mean that breaking that clause is unethical or illegal(I'm not from the US, we don't have draconian internet laws here)
With Android, I believe you could always run anything you wanted in the background, provided you had enough memory. Starting with versions 5-6, restrictions have been put in to prevent abuses and battery draining with the user unaware of it. The two OSs converged towards a mean point from opposite directions in this case.
They're inconsistent. On Firefox Android you can't play in the background using the mobile site but if you switch to the desktop site all of a sudden background play starts working.
That's because Google deliberately prevents background playback on mobile devices, bringing mobile browsers down to the same level of the YouTube app using shady JavaScript APIs. This add-on should fix it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
In most cases (my experience comes from working in broadcast industry but not specifically YouTube), those restrictions are there due to creators wanting to be paid for background playback (this is in 99% cases for music, where not adding this restriction would essentially make creators and the might copyright holders unpaid).
So bypassing the wishes of copyright holder / creator and getting the content for free is pretty much textbook definition of piracy.
Now, we can debate whether piracy is ethical in some cases (and I think it is in many cases, especially due to how cancerous the copyright lobby is these days). But let's not pretend that having a service provider say "hey, pay us 10$ a month for this feature" and then making an app that gives that paid feature for free is some kind of right.
I'd like to focus on a single point here: background playback. If anything, it's Google that's stepping over the boundaries in this situation, trespassing the typical boundaries of an app and breaking the natural interaction model. How I consume (or not) the output of an app should be none of its business. I expect to be able to switch windows, minimize, look away, turn off the screen or mute the volume without the app knowing and acting differently. Forbidding me to do so is an artificial anti-feature and doesn't bring me any sympathy towards Google and their paid offering.
I would keep using NewPipe along with the official app even if it showed ads (which I consider tolerable in YouTube's case) for sanity-restoring features like this one.
The youtube-dl script has been available for what, a decade already? Has that not been long term enough for you? Newpipe is just an Android UI around the same functionality as youtube-dl.
From google's perspective, I would assume that it is much like MS allowing software pirating: It doesn't matter if you watch the ads as long as you don't watch the ads on youtube.
Google needs your preferences more than they need to show you an ad immediately. They can also show you an ad on their search space or any of the sides that use the Google ad network. It actually might be cheaper for them to show you the ad elsewhere when they don't have to pay the youtube content creator as I would assume that the creators don't get any money if their audience doesn't watch the immediate ads in the video.
This is the best youtube client, bar none. It keeps local history and "subscriptions" without requiring you to log in to google. I use it on an Amazon Fire Tablet. There seems to be no iOS equivalent, which is one of the things preventing me from upgrading to an iPad.
Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV? I've tried it several times in the past, and its always been wonky there. I use SmartYouTubeTV (https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/) on AndroidTV right now, and the logged out experience is terrible.
I've had it on my phone for some time, but 75% of the time it fails to play the video, complaining that it failed to parse the video page, or something similar. With youtube-dl, you have to keep it updated for it to not crash with similar errors, so might be a question of updates not being regular enough (I use F-Droid to update it).
Also, suggestion capabilities of Youtube are very high. I'll always be coming back for that until there is an alternative. Unfortunately, that also means that using non-official players is counterproductive (I want to feed the recommendation engine).
I would quibble with that. It's really all or nothing. Youtube changes something, NewPipe breaks entirely. Then NewPipe is updated, and it works perfectly again.
I like NewPipe, but in practice this means you just have to accept that there will be stretches, a few days or a week long, where it just doesn't work at all.
If you want to run your own Fdroid repository, it's quite simple to automate for releases from GitHub/gitlab apis. There's probably some way to automate it completely with GitHub actions even (I've been too lazy to learn to do it properly, so everything I do is just through local scripting on my computer, with netlify signing Fdroid releases for me).
Due to Fdroid being so slow at updating indexes on my older devices, I actually use a secondary Fdroid client (nethunter client also has a privileged extension) for manual updates, which only has my personal repos enabled.
I know what you're talking about since I have experienced it before, but I have not encountered the problem often in the past year or so. Perhaps you were just using it during a dry spell from the NewPipe developers or F-Droid. A number of useful features have been added during the past year, such as the ability to view live streams. A few quirks also exist, such as feeds displaying videos that are posted in the future.
As for the recommendation engine, I prefer gaming it. NewPipe is wonderful because it does not feed it. I have a special profiles setup on my desktop for when I want to feed it. This approach works wonderfully for discovering new channels, allows for multiple profiles to get recommendations for different viewing interests, avoids polluting recommendations based upon a single odd-ball view, and allows finer grained control over the information that I feed Google.
I was experiencing it. Then I realised f-droid just hadn't updated in a while - no doubt it's that Google battery saver feature where the programs I want my phone to run to achieve some background task get banned.
Since updating manually (in f-droid) i have been a happy camper.
F-droid sometimes lags a couple days behind the latest updates. Usually the parsing errors are fixed within a day or two and made available on the official site before f-droid. As far as I know, those are usually caused by updates to youtube itself.
Yeah honestly as far as app repositories go, f-droid's usually pretty good at keeping things up to date. I use it for most apps I can get off there, newpipe's about the only one I bother grabbing straight from the site because I get impatient.
You need to install from the github repository. Youtube changes interface every once in a while, this is really isnt any app's fault, but youtube's. Same thing happens to youtube-dl all the time.
same experience when i was on android (around v7) and f-droid.
it basically crashed/failed every time. i use ytdl quite a lot and updating it once every few months is sufficient ...
It works well for me on Android TV with Nvidia Shield. At one point I noticed after a Newpipe upgrade I couldn't get the cursor to go down to the list of videos. So I downgraded for a couple of weeks. Then when the next version came out I tried it and it was fine again.
One weird thing I noticed was that I used to be able to get a mouse style cursor with the right stick, but that stopped working at some point. Not sure if the change was NewPipe or OS level, but it's still manageable.
If you have USB ports you can always try other types of inputs. Aside from plain keyboard/mouse, there are a bunch of interesting options these days.
I have a shield, and I generally just use the TV remote controlling the shield via HDMI CEC. Maybe that's why it doesn't work well for me. I'll have to try it again.
Shield user here, as of 0.19.5 most things work via a Logitech harmony, so I assume most remotes work at this point. The pause / unpause buttons sometimes result in the UI getting into a weird state.
Yeah that could be it. I use the gamepad or sometimes an air mouse. Both work fine. My only gripe is Nvidia doesn't let you put side loaded apps on the homescreen.
> There seems to be no iOS equivalent, which is one of the things preventing me from upgrading to an iPad.
I use an iPhone 6 and have refused to upgrade iOS to the latest version, so there are quite a few apps that don't work on my phone anymore (when launched, they show a message saying I need to get the latest version of the app, but then I can't get it because it's not available for my version of iOS), one of those apps is YouTube, so I'm limited to accessing it through the browser. It would be great to have a good alternative.
I don't know about op, but when I was using iOS, I developed a firm "only one major OS upgrade allowed" rule after two of my devices were effectively hobbled / near-bricked by iOS upgrades 2+ major versions after the store-bought version.
If you have installed the app before, you should be able to open the App Store, and go to your past purchases. If you find the app in there, then it should download the last compatible version.
I have used that to load old apps onto an iPad that I can't update.
You can also upload IPA files to your iPhone using older versions of iTunes that supports sideloading saved (but purchased) IPA files. Apple now offers downloads for these older versions of iTunes, see here: https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes
Yes, the app downloads, but then the message still shows up. It's not a phone/os problem, it's the app makers forcing users to only use the latest version.
> Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV?
Yes I use newpipe on a Nvidia shield as my primary youtube client. There are at least 3 of us who open tickets as issues come up for Android TV.
It's not the most polished experience, but as of 0.19.5 it's functional. It rarely pulls videos above 1080p quality for some reason, but if I have to choose between 4k content on the youtube client and 1080p with my privacy, and without advertisements that's an easy choice for me to make.
Interesting. I installed it, and I have no problem getting 4K videos. Playback seems fine.
I can't figure out how to make it do a 10s skip forward / backward that you do on phone/tablet by tapping on the left or right side of the screen. I tried all the buttons on the shield's game controller after not being able to skip on my remote. I can change the focus to the timeline, and skip that way, but its not as nice as a 10s skip.
It would be nice if you could sort subscriptions by date. Last time I used it, this wasn't possible, making the entire subscription functionality useless.
> This is the best youtube client, bar none. It keeps local history and "subscriptions" without requiring you to log in to google.
Isn't it funny how one man's feature is another man's bug?
Not supporting logging in with a Google account to keep subscriptions and history synchronized across devices is exactly what disqualifies it from consideration for me, and I suspect I'm not alone here.
For those like me there's YouTube Vanced, which is almost an exact clone of YouTube except without the ads, allows you to disable a bunch of distracting "features" like info cards and watermarks, and with the ability to use MicroG in place of Play Services for the actual logging in with Google feature: https://vanced.app/
Isn't it great that we both have the ability to choose the YouTube replacement app that works best for us despite Google technically "owning" the platform though? This is why I love Android. (EDIT: Re-read this and realized this could be seen as inflammatory. Really did not mean to start a platform war. Just glad that Android is a choice that's available to those who value this kind of thing.)
Chromecast uses Google DNS servers ignoring your DHCP DNS. You need to block Google DNS servers on your router so then the Chromecast will switch to your DHCP DNS.
Also, on my experience, some Youtube ads are served through the same domain that serves the video so you won't be completely ad free.
Cast from a local PC on the network. View from a browser with uBlock Origin. I forget that YouTube even has ads most of the time. Using another person's device is always a painful awakening.
More specifically stick to v14.21.54 of Vanced since otherwise you can see some ads now. I had updated to the latest one and started seeing ads below the video playing and when I am at the home page of my account.
vanced is just the normal youtube app with just some modifications to block ads and background playback. It is closed sourced, not to mention, and uses a modified version of MicroG that works in unknown ways to access/sync with the google account, which is very different to the original MicroG (which has been developed to replace Google Services from your phone to minimize google tracking your activities.) . If you don't want unknown apps get access to your google account or if you care about your privacy/security, don't use Vanced, stick with NewPipe.
But I agree that if you have sensitive data on your google account you should make a value judgement yourself on if the extra convenience/features on Vanced is worth the risk over NewPipe.
I personally use a different mail provider so I don't have much sensitive information on my Google account, basically just using it for YouTube and Play Store.
In case you care about these things you should be aware that Google can use your account to track you, assemble a profile on you and target you even if you don't explicitly hand them any data.
Many people are trying to move away from Google and Youtube, the cross-device and cross-network tracking which this allows being deemed detrimental by more and more people.
There is also Bitchute and Hooktube, if you want to get at Youtube videos without using Google more than absolutely necessary.
I prefer to use Vanced over the NewPipe. New Pipe somehow not always works properly and searching for videos is also not perfect.
But.
NewPipe allows downloading the videos which is great. Sharing video function in Vanced allows using NewPipe for download directly from Vanced application.
I've been using NewPipe for years, and find it to be an example of how an app should be. Besides that it doesn't force you to log in to keep things like subscriptions, one of the best things about it is that it's very snappy, whereas the YouTube app is like every other Google app in that it's slow and not very responsive. Being able to play audio in the background is the killer feature for me.
To those who are looking for few convincing features over YouTube app - It has background playback, download, pop out player all without having to sign-in to any account.
Is anyone familiar with youtube.videodeck.net / pockettube? Aggregates channels into subscription columns like RSS. Like old youtube collections. I've been using the service for years and have yet to see anyone else replicate the feature.
I'm not familiar with your examples, but NewPipe allows you to group your subscriptions and then show the latest videos from each group, sorted by upload date/time (or something similar).
What it misses from a usual RSS reader is the notifications (idk maybe they exist and you only have to turn them on) and the "read"/"viewed" marker.
Isn't it against Google's terms and conditions to run such an app that plays YouTube videos without playing the ads too? I remember reading about that.
Most likely. I understand the appeal of these types of applications but it really just comes off as entitled IMO. Just watch the ads to support the content creators you care about - it isn’t that hard.
I imagine this will be an unpopular opinion here though.
I think most people get enough benefit out of YouTube to warrant the fee. But advertisements allow the platform to be available to anyone with an internet connection. Fair trade off I’d say.
Except for all the entitled people in this very topic who demand this service to work for free, refuse to pay for subscription and still don't want ads either.
I agree with your statement but there are other sides too.
Regarding ads:
Showing ads like "Girl Mobile Video Talk" with description "Girl Mobile Number Live Video Call" with "Install Link" in a youtube ads is unacceptable. And the worst thing is you cannot even turn off that ads without being turning on ads personalization.
Regarding Money:
10$ may be a cup of coffee for you but in other side of world people are earning 200$ of salary so they just can't afford it. So many people don't have privilege like average Americans have?
Regarding supporting creators.
Sure ads pay creator but showing ads every 10minute , beginning of video and end of video is total BS. And even creator are already using their own ads like "This video is sponsored by Brilliant.org" so I don't mind blocking ads.
It's not simply about the consumers. Google is playing a balancing game between pushing ads on enough people to make the service sustainable, while still willingly allowing the people who want to block ads to do so.
With their resources and the nature of the service, they could easily win the cat-and-mouse game against ad-blocker devs if they wanted to.
The reason they don't, is because they actually want to keep those "entitled people" on their platform, in order to avoid giving competing platforms an opening to grow their own communities. They know there is a substantial part of their userbase who would simply not use their service if they had to either pay or endure the vanilla experience.
I'm happy to support content creators with patreon when they offer a way to do so. _Especially_ when they offer a way to see their videos off YouTube. I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.
I mostly use YouTube to discover niche content, but only because I've been running an ad-blocker since forever. I cannot fathom how anyone could enjoy it in any other way currently. When I see how IT works at friend's houses I'm horrified.
If YT blocked access for browsers with ad-blockers (or make it inconvenient enough) I would essentially stop using it.
> I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.
You're supporting them just by using them, whether they are showing you ads or tracking you or not. You're reducing demand on other platforms for this content because you're letting YouTube provide it for you. If you really want to stand against YouTube, don't use it. Otherwise, you're still supporting their platform, you've just decided to do so in a way that saves you time, money and convenience at the expense of YouTube and the content creators on YouTube.
If you're going to do it, you might as well own it.
You're absolutely right of course. But it's still a chicken-and-egg problem. YT is frequently the only platform where content creators publish because of network effects.
I guess it's too easy for me to continue using YT for discovery.
Yep, and it's those network effects which are strengthened through using YouTube even if they aren't making revenue from ads through you.
It's similar to disliking Walmart and Amazon but still using them because they are cheap, convenient, a known factor, etc, which many do (including me, in the case of Amazon). The first step is acknowledging the trade-off you're making and being aware of it. At least then people are making a conscious choice, so if they want to re-evaluate at some point, they can do so with better facts.
Being semi curious why creators aren't already using any of the other hosts, I poked around a bit.
OMG.
Whereas YouTube is a toxic cesspool, the others are blackhole hellmouths leading directly to eternal damnation. Meaning the wannabe's complete abrogation of their responsibilities show that YouTube's pathetic attempts at content moderation are better than nothing.
I now think there's an opportunity for white label video hosting.
Counterpoint: the amount of advertisements needed to sustain video production ultimately hinders the value of the video.
If I'm watching an hour long video about X, and I have to watch 40 mid-roll ads, I'm way more likely to turn it off. I'd much rather directly support creators via Patreon, and Adblock everything else.
i did not but i do not pay youtube premium. Mostly because all that money will go to RIAA and other DMCA backers, not content creators. Specially not the ones everyone here watches.
Nobody uses youtube because they love it. Everyone uses youtube because google effectively killed all the competition by sliding billions of investor money to DMCA backers. And well, this one time it worked out nice for them, i guess. But it is not a business practice I will support. Fortunately, i'm technical enough to play their cat and mouse game to consume creators who are hostage to their monopoly on discovery.
Ha! People are downvoting your comment too. I am also interested in a civil discussion about why people believe they are entitled to the content and service without contributing back. Maybe downvotes are easier than thoughtful replies.
Well, if you want an example, the premium subscription is not available in my country. I send a small sum (small by Western standards and pretty substantial to me) once or twice a year directly to the creators of two channels I am interested in.
The entitlement among the general population is a little nuts. We expect things for free, without ads, and with high reliability. In this case we also want additional features like not logging in, downloads and background playback. Side note: Is it any wonder that journalism is dying when no one wants to pay for it (or be subject to advertising)?
YouTube is asking that their users either watch ads or pay money. That's how YouTube and creators can keep the lights on. I think that's a fair model. There are other models, like Vimeo, where the uploader pays for the hosting.
It certainly seems like the future is one where we expect access to everything and pay for nothing. That worries me.
YouTube makes a profit, after all operational costs are accounted for, they aren't paying creators what they're owed. Why would I support a company who regularly short changes the creators who work hard to produce quality content?
Hmm, YouTube pays out massive amount of money every year to creators (if I remember their revenue report, it's majority of their revenue), so I'm not sure what exactly are you talking about?
in the olden days, i could walk into a newsagent/video shop, pick up a product, exchange some plesantries, put down some coins, and walk out. no-one would know my name or anything about me.
nowadays, if you want to pay for a newspaper article or a video, you have to fork over all your pii and oblige yourself to paying a certain sum in the future unless you do something to cancel it.
there is no fairness in commerce any more. they treat us like hostiles, and we have to treat them like hostiles.
the current choice isn't between paying for it or pirating it, it's between handing over your identity and future income or actively hiding.
one party to this commercial transaction doesn't need to eat and has an income the size of hundreds of thousands of the other side.
NewPipe doesn't need to be trusted where Google actively requires you to trust them - yet repeatedly acts untrustworthily.
If they want me to happily give them money, let me do it without trusting those who do not deserve my trust. I shouldn't have to trust corporations.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I appreciate it, ferzul.
I 100% agree that personal data has unfortunately found its way into a transaction in which it should not belong. I respect the fact that you push back on this point, though I do find "treat them like hostiles" as an extreme position. Other entities offer transactions that I find abhorrent, and I simply just refuse to interact with them.
If paying for physical media (be it movies or newspapers or anything else) with "coins" is still valuable to you, I encourage you to continue to practice that behavior, and encourage others as well. It is still mostly possible in many cases.
> ...Google actively requires you to trust them... ... I shouldn't have to trust corporations.
Regarding YouTube, you can still interact with them in a trustless environment. Browse in incognito mode in a non-Google browser. Google gets to show an ad to an anonymous user and you get to watch a video. End of transaction.
I'd be more than happy to pay google for add free youtube if they weren't also stealing my data. Bottom line is that I should be able to set the price for my data and they wouldn't want to pay me what it is worth to me.
That's a good question, ideally the creator should provide as many options for support as they can, in order to capture as much revenue for their work. It's then on the consumer to decide which they're most comfortable with, whether it's advertisement, or direct support, etc.
While an interesting question, 99% of people are just looking for free content, not for alternate ways to support content creators. So it's not all that relevant of a question.
a good trick is to mute the sound and focus on the countdown button on the right hand side. that way you don't really see the ad at all but if anyone is collecting metrics on whether the ad was displayed they will register it
It's certainly not a popular opinion, but it's definitely an uninformed opinion. The aim of NewPipe is not to "stick it to the man" or even to advertisers, it's to create a superior viewing experience that removes much of the bloat of Youtube's official app, and also being light on system resources. Whereas the official app used to crash and warm up my Moto G5 Plus, NewPipe has been running like a dream for years.
Not that it addresses paying for the infrastructure, but many of the creators I watch are now reading ad copy within their videos and are otherwise sponsored directly.
It doesn't remove ads, it just doesn't play them. Why do you expect the developer spend effort on funneling money to Google while degrading the viewing experience?
I'm really not sure what you mean by this comment. Are you talking about NewPipe?
NewPipe is not a re-release of any Android Play Store app, or like any hacked app (like YouTube Vanced). It provides features beyond even YouTube Premium's featureset, removes perceived anti-features like Google Play Services integration, and is much more lightweight to boot.
That is really absurd logic. It doesn't take very long to click on the OP's link, visit the project homepage, and see that NewPipe offers far more than just being ad-free. The home-page mentions ads a grand total of 1 times.
As entitled as it may be, I will assert my right to limit the data I send to Google.
It is a mistake to assume that everyone blocks ads because they do not want to watch ads. In my case, it is playing a game of damage control with a major corporation that has the ability to connect my activities across much of the web. Other people legitimately point to the cost of bandwidth. I am sure that other reasons exist.
It is also to the benefit if creators if they diversify their revenue streams. At the moment, they are far too dependent upon decisions made by Google. Some have realized this by requesting donations from users, merchandising, baking in ads from sponsors, and promoting alternate distribution mechanisms. While seeking out other sources of revenues creates problems for people who are just starting out, it is pretty much a necessity for people who are seeking to earn money from their work.
> It is also to the benefit if creators if they diversify their revenue streams.
Watching content on YouTube while blocking ads does not encourage creators to go to other platforms. You've already consumed their product, thus lessening demand, so there's less reason to put it on another platform. It's not likely you'll go watch it on Vimeo after they upload it there when you've already seen it on YouTube.
Creators may be better off with a donation and merchandise revenue stream. Describing your actions as "benefitting" them by helping them see this by depriving them of revenue from you for their content is a slightly odd take though.
> Describing your actions as "benefitting" them by helping them see this by depriving them of revenue from you for their content is a slightly odd take though.
The claim was that creators would benefit from diversifying, not that my actions were benefiting them. I was quite clear that my motivations were related to Google.
Oh we can discuss payment for google services as soon as they pay me for all the data they collect on me all over the internet and my phone - it isn't that hard.
I believe the F-Droid version is currently one patch behind. You can actually add https://archive.newpipe.net/fdroid/repo in F-Droid as a repository and you'll get the updates for NewPipe a lot faster.
I actually ended up going down a different route and created my own F-Droid repository for NewPipe and a couple other apps so I could get faster updates for them and I trust the upstream developers.
Yeah, I would recommend not signing in from your google and I might be paranoid, but I disable play protect. I've heard stories of accounts being banned for using newpipe, but they may just be stories with no basis behind it.
Ytdl is use by other programs as a backend and can so indirectly support streaming rather than downloading; ex. if you have both installed, you can `mpv $YT_URL` and it'll work.
Considering that Google charges subscription for this features, it's not only against ToS, but also unethical IMO.
It's one thing to hate a company and refuse to use their products and a whole nother thing to promote products that sidestep features the service asks money for.
I used to be in your camp but after Google had only showed a number of us irrelevant ads for years after years I decided it didn't matter: I don't want to date hot Russian/Taiwanese/Ukrainian/Thai women, I'm not interested in dating elderly women near me - and I'm not interested in dating guys either. Nothing against any of those persons, but I'm happily married after all so even the idea of browsing those sites is crazy to me (not that I used any of them before either).
With that I have almost exhausted the list of ads that Google thought has been relevant for me since I started dating my wife well over a decade ago.
Why they cannot show ads for family holidays, programming conferences, local stores etc I don't know but if I had to guess I'd say they could need some diversity on their teams ;-). (Adding a few married parents with stable marriages and small children should do the trick, but I am not interested and haven't been for a couple of years, I find Google close to disgusting sometimes and whatever technical edge it has has disappeared to the degree that I'm positively surprised to just see sane results like they used to be in 2007.)
Google not displaying relevant ads do NOT in any way make it less wrong. In your case, there are 2 'ethical' options: use premium or avoid the service. Btw I also use adblock so I am a part of the problem.
By paying for premium you support a company whose business model is based on selling emotional manipulation (i.e. ads). You support a company that violates your right to use the software of your choice on your personal property. And you give in to extortion by paying for not being exposed to emotional manipulation. Paying for premium is the unethical option here.
> By paying for premium you support a company whose business model is based on selling emotional manipulation
The corollary of that is that any interaction with such a company is unethical, since it encourages them to continue the manipulation on people who may not be as aware or resistant.
I therefore assume you've routed YouTube.com to :: ?
For a number of years I allowed them to run JS on my device and download ads from other servers to my device.
I have now instructed my rendering device to not do that. Even as a devout christian that doesn't feel unethical.
I'm free to try to avoid the ads, they are free (within limits) to get me to view ads.
A pro tip in that regard would be to make the ads relevant and unobtrusive.
A good first step here would be to include them statically on the server side and make sure they don't contain any moving or noisy elements.
Another good idea would be to select ads not solely on what company they can fleece for most money by showing me irrelevant ads but also factor in if the ad is in any way relevant.
A weird justification, "Oh they show me irrelevant ads" Just say that you don't care. Or do the right thing and either pay, don't watch or use it with ads.
To all the downvoters: you are experiencing cognitive dissonance. You cheat, yet convince yourself somehow that what you do isn’t wrong. But deep, deep down you know.
On the other hand, blocking absolutely adequate YouTube accounts (engineering, education, history) without explanation and appeal process is super unethical. Creating monopoly (which definition YouTube perfectly fits) is not only unethical, but against the law, as well as constant user's privacy violations.
Some content creators on YT (such as Legal Eagle, etc.) are also now on Nebula. $15 USD per year right now. Apparently they don't have to worry so much about de-monetization, however that works.
Being the dominant player in the market doesn't make it illegal. It has to either have reached the dominant status through illegal means or engage in activities that help it maintain the position by destroying competition using anti-competitive means. What did youtube do to be "against the law"?
On the other hand, leveraging the network effect to form a monopoly which compromises privacy and user security by coordinating with state aggressors around the globe...probably more unethical than controlling the software running on your own device?
NewPipe just scrapes the website. It uses no official APIs, and it does not try to fool the Google infrastructure into thinking it was the official YouTube app or something.
Google should, at least in theory, treat users of NewPipe same way it treats browser users with adblock.
Fun story: adblock does NOT block youtube ads. It would be almost impossible to - they are served from the same inscrutable urls as real videos. Instead youtube detects adblock and does not show ads to adblock users on purpose.
So next time you see a YouTube employee, thank them for that
Adblock Plus for example uses EasyList by default, and that contains this rule to block the ads:
youtube.com#@#.video-ads
Your claim might still be correct if google keeps that class name to avoid breaking adblockers (considering most other class names on google properties are randomly generated and change each week)
Actually, no.
> they are served from the same inscrutable urls as real video
This may be right, so host based adblocking may not work.
However, uBlock origin etc definitely block youtube ads and it works as a browser extension so they have access to the DOM and probably do something there.
I've noticed in the last few weeks that YouTube has some sort of fallback when an ad gets blocked. You get a white overlay with with impossible-to-read lightgrey text on it, with a blue button in the middle with a call to action on it (eg Signup Now, Click to Learn More). There is still a Skip Ad button and a widget to indicate when the ad will go away on its own.
I have two YouTube accounts, and at first it only happened on one. Now it is happening to both. Maybe it is something they are currently just testing.
I don't think ViewPure counts as a YouTube client. It just embeds a YouTube video, which is enough to strip away the YouTube clutter, but it's not reimplementing the YouTube player's JavaScript code the way invidio.us does, for instance.
I could be mistaken but I don't think YouTube officially permits third-party clients of any sort. Perhaps that's a good litmus test.
This is the only app we allow our kids to watch YouTube on. It dispenses with the ads and 90% of the tricks they use to keep you watching (no overlays at the end and no autoplay).
It's nice for listening to music, but a bit cumberstone to use.
I wish:
* the playlist was easily accessible from the left pane drawer
* autoplay was easily toggleable from the playlist view
* the automatically added title wouldn't be a regular title in the playlist before it's played (a bit lower and grayed, and adding items would do so above that title)
* the playlist would show various options for the next automatic title.
I've looked into that. I guess I bit more than I could chew (peertube integration, though now with libtorrent supporting webtorrents, it could be easier).
But nowadays, I don't really want to invest time in the Android ecosystem, especially as I think I'll switch my daily driver to a PinePhone soon enough. The desktop equivalent is freetube, I think.
You can also disable autoplay in the official client.
(and pay for YouTube premium to disable ads; otherwise you're watching videos without contributing back to the people creating them and video hosting/streaming fees)
Probably my favourite part about Newpipe is the option to skip silences. If you're watching/listening to a speech-only video, it (at least feels) like such an improvement.
I've been following this app for a while, and for a long time I was using a PR version of the app that kept the subscription list in order of time (which didn't exist for a really long time). But they finally merged it a while back, so the published app finally became usable for me.
I really wonder why so many innocuous, on-topic comments about NewPipe are being downvoted in this thread. Are YouTube employees raiding HN or something? /s
NewPipe is a great app, lighter on system resources than the official YouTube app, free & open-source, and a joy to use especially if you're overwhelmed by the serious UI "bloat" that YouTube has been suffering from in recent years. In addition to being ad-free, in many other ways is it a superior video-viewing experience.
The DRM will get broken if there's enough effort dedicated to it just like every latest movie or TV show somehow ends up on torrent sites despite pretty advanced DRM.
Netflix shows end up on torrent sites in short order, yet youtube-dl doesn't support netflix (contrary to what the name suggests, it supports hundreds of sites besides youtube: https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html)
You need Youtube Premium for that. I have a legacy Google Play Music subscription and sometimes I feel like my experience vastly different than people without Youtube Premium. I use Youtube enough I'm ok paying to not see ads and play videos with my phone screen off.
Oh they have been very clear about needing youtube premium for that.
I do get it to an extent. If people want to use it as a jukebox. I have spotify and mp3s for that. I want to play videos in the background that don't have actual visual content ("people talking to the camera" style) and google doesn't want that.
Luckily I can use alternatives for nearly all content like this, first and foremost actual RSS podcasts.
As for the experience being very different on premium: I recently had to use YT on a browser without uBlock/uMatrix and I believe I got a taste of that difference. Scary stuff, not sure how people cope with all the shit being thrown at them.
I dont mind paying for the feature but I do mind having google aplication on my phone (which I dont - none).
The trust in google not taking away my contacts, spying on my position, requiring to have their gms on my phone (which will further grab as much of my data they can have) is virtually zero.
On Firefox for Android for example, the vast majority of video playing sites automatically continue to play in the background. YouTube should, but it has code specifically to check for Firefox tabs being backgrounded and pause the player. So it's going out of its way to disable a feature of the browser. Happily this can be reversed with an extension, but yes, it is an intentional anti-feature. Whether you agree with that business practice is your own judgement.
Personally I think the real value add of Youtube Premium is the ability to offline videos in the official app; that's not something the browser can normally do. Well, and the secondary effect of contributing somewhat to creators, even if the payout isn't significant through that channel. It's nice for it to be automatic and not require an explicit subscription.
Fwiw, the relatively few creators who are talking about it publicly tend to agree that cpm is (much) higher for premium users than users monetized through ads. So if you want creators to get more money, paying for premium is better than watching ads.
This right here is why I maintain my subscription even though I do not run the official app. :) Well, that and I mostly watch YouTube on my desktop with an ad blocker, so creators weren't getting ad impressions from me anyway. I figure that's a fair trade.
If you open YouTube in desktop mode (in the browser) and switch tabs, you can still play the video via the notification manager popup (not sure how it's called, basically when you drag down the top bar, there is still this sticky YouTube notification). This is how you can get free background play without 3rd party apps.
Downvoted this for complaining about downvotes, breaking site guidelines (oh, not only that, it combines snark and insinuation about astroturfing too). Votes swing a lot, so when more votes come in and previously downvoted comments turn positive, complaints like this just end up as pure noise. Happens all the time.
> I really wonder why so many innocuous, on-topic comments about NewPipe are being downvoted in this thread. Are YouTube employees raiding HN or something? /s
At this point pretty much all comments saying that this is bypassing paid features are downvoted into oblivion and grayed out, so what exactly are you talking about?
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a YouTube/Google employee, just someone who cares a lot about preserving the quality of discussion HN is known for.)
Haha... I can't imagine being on the fence about it. I'm used to speaking my mind & getting censored, but the people who are "on the left" are starting to censor each other. "Don't believe you should put healthy children in social isolation because of an invisible thing you've never seen? I'll see if I can get you fired from your job."
It may be mistaken on HN, but all social media companies are gamed by corporations, political parties, foreign governments, native governments, intelligence agencies, powerful churches, lobby groups, media companies, advertisers.
Anything that can be interpreted even the slightest in favor of Google/YouTube is automatically downvoted by the HN mob. If anything, this thread is a prime example of that.
Well, I've been there with having to implement Google's login outside Google, and I can say that it is most definitely non-trivial.
To get the official Google token, you must go through a massive wad of obfuscated JavaScript in a browser VM. It uses a thing called "BotGuard" for which barely any information is available online to prevent automated logins, and apparently the code changes on every request to the login form. I know this from poking around at the page source and seeing a blurb advertising their credential security division slipped in at the top, like they just know that the only way you're getting that token is if it's exactly how Google and that security division wanted you to, and they felt the need to inform everyone attempting to reverse engineer the thing by looking at the source what they think of their effort.
This is the reason why we don't have Google login in another unofficial YouTube frontend called invidious[1] and youtube-dl[2].
That's right, not even youtube-dl can handle logging in to YouTube since about April 2019. That was about the time that Google apparently got around to patching their auth endpoint so you have to run their obfuscated JavaScript if you want in. Since then scores of issues reporting 400 responses from trying to download Watch Later or private playlists were posted on youtube-dl's tracker, collected in the issue I mentioned. Their response? Close it as a duplicate without, well, any other response. None as of present writing, eight months later. Exactly the same response as nearly every other issue reporting the same error.
That is a misstep on youtube-dl's part, and has greatly affected my impression of the project's leadership, but part of me also thinks that they don't want to admit that it's nearly impossible to get past a system Google specifically designed to be impossible for third-party clients to get past.
Just a thought: maybe it could add a function to just sync user's subscriptions via scraping their user page? Of course this requires you to make it public, but at least it would provide an additional option.
The last 3 years I've been very happy with "YouTube Vanced", in particular because of: background play, native adblocking, fully native logged in experience if desired, AND it switches to audio only encode if background play is enabled so it saves data.
NewPipe also has background play that only uses the audio feed. I thought I would miss the logged in experience but if you take a few minutes to subscribe through the app, the UX is actually better or at least on par with the native youtube app.
Cause fuck content creators right? Who do those jerks think they are putting all that time, energy and money into creating content and then expecting to earn a living from it? They should just give it all to me for free!
why hasn't anyone built a fully-featured desktop Youtube front-end experience? With, like, borderless floating video (a la Firefox's floating video feature), dimming the desktop, a search experience that doesn't bombard you with clickbait garbage, etc?
it seems like Youtube.com is really just a fancy mp4 player, targeting static video content.
does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing? What's their stance on them? Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?
> does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing?
Not really, no. Though they took some kind of legal action against Hooktube I remember.
> Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?
They already do this to some extent for videos with copyrighted content, but it's not very aggressive and has long been reverse-engineered and dealt with. They use a series of three string transformations like reversal, replacing a single letter, etc. on an alphanumeric signature parameter. The sequence of transformations varies per video but can be extracted from the Javascript source using regular expressions.
Here are some available clients I know of. I do not know if there any that use floating videos or dim the desktop as you say:
Youtube might be the only place I actually don't mind ads. Some creators on youtube are extremely good at providing valuable content in short form - I use it primarily as a learning platform, whether I am doing wood work, learning how to fix something at home, or learning about a new topic. I would rather continue to support these creators by watching ads on their own channel than paying for a subscription that covers everything.
It's an invaluable resource and until there's something better taking the ads away takes part of their income away.
Which doesn't cover the cost of video hosting, transcoding and streaming. Or the cost of other software development of YouTube.
If you'd ever work on anything close to video streaming industry you'd find out that the costs of delivering video to the world is massive. And paying for those services is how you make them sustainable (and add competition).
Incredible. The idea that YouTube artificially limits the function to get you to do stuff is really annoying. I love that you can send the audio to the background. I've wanted that for years.
IIRC they used to let you do that a decade ago, then slowly made it harder and harder until it was impossible. Its a 'feature' now of youtube premium so take that as you will.
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[0] https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
It's still easy to work around, but maybe Google's getting more aggressive about blockers.
Not that I believe it, but fighting ad blockers in general is a losing battle in my opinion, eventually you will just end up blocking too many eyeballs, and your ad revenue will drop.
Free and Open Source - https://sponsor.ajay.app/
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/pull/3205
I implemented the update notification for the GitHub APKs few years back.
There is also a ton of ad blockers for Safari which block YouTube ads.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/musi-simple-music-streaming/id...
Wow and it's been up for years! Do they scrape YouTube like NewPipe? How come Google didn't go nuts about taking it down?
A downside to Musi is that after playing a video a full screen ad will often pop up in a way that feels invasive and can be difficult to avoid inadvertently clicking. The behavior feels like malware, which leaves me concerned that the developers behind the app might hold flexible ethics and engage in practices such as covertly monetizing user data.
>(and you can choose whether to download them as audio files)
Videos with still images (many songs) shouldn't be much data at all over the audio alone.
Nit: Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Is this an attempt to mimic how you speak aloud?
>Consider the Official YouTube app, with a paid YouTube Premium subscription.
That is definitely an option, but people who use things like youtube-dl or apps like NewPipe probably aren't in the target audience for YouTube Premium.
>Videos with still images (many songs) shouldn't be much data at all over the audio alone.
Part of the point is if you never intend to watch the content, but only want to listen to it, there's no point to having video.
Of course.
> ...probably aren't in the target audience for YouTube Premium.
True. It's unclear if OP fits that description though. Re-read OP's comment.
> ...there's no point to having video.
Agreed. I think it most cases, there is no video for still image YouTube content. Just, you know, a still image. I don't know the extent this is true, nor do I know OP's use case. Assuming that OP is interested in music, the video component shouldn't be a real issue. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6007071?hl=en
It's to add condescension.
That was my assumption. Things like "um" and "uh" tend to be silence-fillers, among other things (see below). It's weird to see them being typed-out, and I've noted an uptick in how often I see it being done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_disfluency
Yep.
There's something about internet culture that rots our ability to have conversations with others. It's something I've also noticed in myself (it's easy to complain about everyone else) as someone who, sheepishly, has snuck in a juvenile "Um..." when I think I've really got'em good.
I suspect the uptick in just this sort of rot going mainstream. Like instead of bringing your in-person social skills online when the internet was newer, and then becoming corrupted over time, people are just born into the rot from a young age.
And frankly it takes eternal vigilance to stay a noncombative and fair online.
I think I sort of built it up over time though, I remember not being able to do 2x previously because it seemed to fast, but I guess I got used to it.
Edit: I'm a very, very happy new pipe user, this is literally the one feature I'm waiting for. And there is a GitHub issue being worked on for it.
It seems like NewPipe can't even add an option to enable ads because third-party ads are against F-Droid policy.
not sure how much truth in that, but I've avoided using such apps because of that.
My only major complaint is that the colour of the seek bar is hard to see on black backgrounds.
Even if I were to pay for Youtube Red, this application has a feature that I cannot get with the official app: a lack of dependence on the Google Play store and services. Since I run a build of Android that does not include those services, this app is wonderful to bridge the gap, as it performs much better than playing the videos directly in Firefox. That it happens to include a bunch of extra features the official app does not is just a bonus really.
If there was a way to pay for YouTube premium and make the money go to the creators I watch while using a FOSS client like NewPipe, I'd be willing to pay several more times the current price of YouTube premium for that.
And yet the HN community happily endorses such apps when it comes to Google. I also wonder why moderators think that this is acceptable in terms of YouTube.
Developers have long since abandoned the concept of providing demos to "try the game" before you buy it. If I am thinking about buying a game but can't be convinced that I'll get my money's worth, I'll pirate the game. If I end up liking the game, I might as well buy it so that I can use online features, receive updates, and not have to worry with the crack causing weird bugs. In these cases, piracy has filled in the roll of demo software and provides a net positive for companies because any converts to paying customers would likely have never purchased the game had they not pirated it.
Alternatively, look at something like the anime fansub scene. Fansubs often have far better quality than anything you'll see coming from legitimate anime streaming services. I pay for anime streaming subscriptions but I can't count the number of times I've refused to watch something on the service due to how bad the subtitles were, torrented an actually good fansub, and then supported the series (not the streaming platform) through alternative means.
You also have the digital preservation aspect. Piracy is the reason most early console games are playable nowadays. Emulators aren't really legal and all of the published ROMs are very much pirated content but if they didn't exist, how many games would be either extraordinarily rare or lost to time by now. Same goes for music. What.cd was an incredible archive of music and it preserved tonnes of tracks from small now defunct bands throughout the start of the millennium. This is all content that would otherwise be lost to time if pirates hadn't preserved them due to their own motivations.
There's more on this out on the web. I read a really cool article about it a while back but I can't find it atm.
One of the features is background playback of audio from videos. On the desktop, that's a feature that exists thanks to your window manager. Is that unethical?
It isn't stealing to use another method to get a feature someone is selling you, any more than using a third party DVR is stealing from a company offering you one as part of a more expensive package.
They have implemented the feature independently, and are providing it as a way of doing the same thing as something YouTube is selling you, I don't see that as a problem.
(NewPipe also has features that YouTube's app just doesn't support at all, like higher speed playback than 2x).
Playing in the background is not a "feature", it's a basic device capability, the fact that YouTube went out of their way to prevent it does not make it right, imagine if the browser client had stopped playing when you went out of focus - that'd be completely unacceptable. The fact that somehow this is accepted on smartphones probably says more about consumers lack of technological competence and awareness (and maybe historical reasons, as earlier versions of Android/iOS didn't have proper multi-tasking)
Google has terms of use on their service.
You are violating those terms of service.
This is completely cut and dry.
Under the heading, "Permissions and Restrictions":
> The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:
> 1. access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders;
> 2. circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;
> 3. access the Service using any automated means (such as robots, botnets or scrapers) except (a) in the case of public search engines, in accordance with YouTube’s robots.txt file; or (b) with YouTube’s prior written permission;
I think this is just one of those cases where copyright/IP law moves too slowly compared to the technology it tries to cover.
They are "accessing ... part of the Service or Content [without being] expressly authorized."
To make it concrete, as an example, a user using youtube-dl is violating the terms. Not the makers of youtube-dl.
Are they though? AFAIK, law is very pedantic, and technically speaking, a human is physically incapable of accessing Youtube; we use tools to do so. We use some kind of software to access youtube.com, in this case, we are using an app that accesses youtube.com and relays the content on that page back to us. Similar to say, using Chrome or Firefox to access youtube.com and relay the contents on the page back to us.
Note, the APP accesses youtube.com, not the user. The app is (potentially) in violation, the user using the app is not. In fact, the user may not even know that the app is actually accessing youtube. Again, IANAL and I'm sure this is argued both ways, but I'm just saying this is an interpretation of the terms.
"Your Honour, technically I did not break the window. I had to use a rock as my agent, therefore the rock is guilty."
> You are violating those terms of service.
That's not what piracy means, and that's not how the law works. If I state that the terms of service of reading this comment are that you must hop on one leg for the rest of your life, and you continue to walk on two, you won't be violating any laws.
OP claimed, "It's my own right to save those packets(without re-distributing) them and watch them in any form I like." That is not accurate. He doesn't magically GAIN COPYRIGHT over content, just because he downloaded it. His use MAY be covered by Fair Use Laws, but it may also still be a violation of YouTube's Terms of Service.
What's the difference between downloading and streaming a video? It's OK for the bytes to stay in main memory/network cache, but not in HDD? Would taking a memory dump of the RAM break their TOS?
"It's my own right to save those packets(without re-distributing) them and watch them in any form I like."
YouTube lets you rent movies for 48 hours.
You download a movie. You then claimed you can watch the movie in any form you like. Such as, later than the 48 hours.
They should at least consider the possibility. Go in with open eyes, so to say.
This story comes to mind:
https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/239728-google-suspends-ac...
If this happens, even more people will take their eggs out of Google's basket. I've already migrated my email to another provider and use Searx[1] for search.
[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
If you do use it, please don't violate the TOS, because it increases the chances you'll screw it up for everyone else (me). People who violate TOS are why we can't have nice things.
It just also is unethical. Cheers.
So bypassing the wishes of copyright holder / creator and getting the content for free is pretty much textbook definition of piracy.
Now, we can debate whether piracy is ethical in some cases (and I think it is in many cases, especially due to how cancerous the copyright lobby is these days). But let's not pretend that having a service provider say "hey, pay us 10$ a month for this feature" and then making an app that gives that paid feature for free is some kind of right.
I'd like to focus on a single point here: background playback. If anything, it's Google that's stepping over the boundaries in this situation, trespassing the typical boundaries of an app and breaking the natural interaction model. How I consume (or not) the output of an app should be none of its business. I expect to be able to switch windows, minimize, look away, turn off the screen or mute the volume without the app knowing and acting differently. Forbidding me to do so is an artificial anti-feature and doesn't bring me any sympathy towards Google and their paid offering.
I would keep using NewPipe along with the official app even if it showed ads (which I consider tolerable in YouTube's case) for sanity-restoring features like this one.
Google needs your preferences more than they need to show you an ad immediately. They can also show you an ad on their search space or any of the sides that use the Google ad network. It actually might be cheaper for them to show you the ad elsewhere when they don't have to pay the youtube content creator as I would assume that the creators don't get any money if their audience doesn't watch the immediate ads in the video.
Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV? I've tried it several times in the past, and its always been wonky there. I use SmartYouTubeTV (https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/) on AndroidTV right now, and the logged out experience is terrible.
Also, suggestion capabilities of Youtube are very high. I'll always be coming back for that until there is an alternative. Unfortunately, that also means that using non-official players is counterproductive (I want to feed the recommendation engine).
I would quibble with that. It's really all or nothing. Youtube changes something, NewPipe breaks entirely. Then NewPipe is updated, and it works perfectly again.
I like NewPipe, but in practice this means you just have to accept that there will be stretches, a few days or a week long, where it just doesn't work at all.
Unless you're talking aboit videos that had stereo audio that have been converted to mono. (;
Due to Fdroid being so slow at updating indexes on my older devices, I actually use a secondary Fdroid client (nethunter client also has a privileged extension) for manual updates, which only has my personal repos enabled.
I know what you're talking about since I have experienced it before, but I have not encountered the problem often in the past year or so. Perhaps you were just using it during a dry spell from the NewPipe developers or F-Droid. A number of useful features have been added during the past year, such as the ability to view live streams. A few quirks also exist, such as feeds displaying videos that are posted in the future.
As for the recommendation engine, I prefer gaming it. NewPipe is wonderful because it does not feed it. I have a special profiles setup on my desktop for when I want to feed it. This approach works wonderfully for discovering new channels, allows for multiple profiles to get recommendations for different viewing interests, avoids polluting recommendations based upon a single odd-ball view, and allows finer grained control over the information that I feed Google.
Since updating manually (in f-droid) i have been a happy camper.
You need to install from the github repository. Youtube changes interface every once in a while, this is really isnt any app's fault, but youtube's. Same thing happens to youtube-dl all the time.
If the app crashes with a Java stack backtrace, it's the app's fault.
One weird thing I noticed was that I used to be able to get a mouse style cursor with the right stick, but that stopped working at some point. Not sure if the change was NewPipe or OS level, but it's still manageable.
If you have USB ports you can always try other types of inputs. Aside from plain keyboard/mouse, there are a bunch of interesting options these days.
I use an iPhone 6 and have refused to upgrade iOS to the latest version, so there are quite a few apps that don't work on my phone anymore (when launched, they show a message saying I need to get the latest version of the app, but then I can't get it because it's not available for my version of iOS), one of those apps is YouTube, so I'm limited to accessing it through the browser. It would be great to have a good alternative.
I have used that to load old apps onto an iPad that I can't update.
Apple also makes iTunes 12.6.x available for download, but it's hidden on this page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208079 - this is the last Windows version with IPA management, but there are also other ways to sideload IPA files without needing XCode and a developer signing certificate, e.g. https://codeburst.io/latest-itunes-12-7-removed-the-apps-opt...
The question is - how are we supposed to save and archive those IPA files today?
I should have said that I was asking how users can acquire IPA files without having jailbroken their device first.
I’ve used this to do other functions before, but not saving IPAs.
https://imazing.com/guides/how-to-manage-apps-without-itunes
Why not get an Android then?
Yes I use newpipe on a Nvidia shield as my primary youtube client. There are at least 3 of us who open tickets as issues come up for Android TV.
It's not the most polished experience, but as of 0.19.5 it's functional. It rarely pulls videos above 1080p quality for some reason, but if I have to choose between 4k content on the youtube client and 1080p with my privacy, and without advertisements that's an easy choice for me to make.
I can't figure out how to make it do a 10s skip forward / backward that you do on phone/tablet by tapping on the left or right side of the screen. I tried all the buttons on the shield's game controller after not being able to skip on my remote. I can change the focus to the timeline, and skip that way, but its not as nice as a 10s skip.
Skipping ahead/forward works out of the box on my harmony remote, long press on the <- or -> button.
I'm not sure what it would be on the default shield remote (mine is broken).
Isn't it funny how one man's feature is another man's bug?
Not supporting logging in with a Google account to keep subscriptions and history synchronized across devices is exactly what disqualifies it from consideration for me, and I suspect I'm not alone here.
For those like me there's YouTube Vanced, which is almost an exact clone of YouTube except without the ads, allows you to disable a bunch of distracting "features" like info cards and watermarks, and with the ability to use MicroG in place of Play Services for the actual logging in with Google feature: https://vanced.app/
Isn't it great that we both have the ability to choose the YouTube replacement app that works best for us despite Google technically "owning" the platform though? This is why I love Android. (EDIT: Re-read this and realized this could be seen as inflammatory. Really did not mean to start a platform war. Just glad that Android is a choice that's available to those who value this kind of thing.)
Also, on my experience, some Youtube ads are served through the same domain that serves the video so you won't be completely ad free.
Their stance on why they can't open source it sounds reasonable: https://github.com/YTVanced/VancedWebsite/issues/10
But I agree that if you have sensitive data on your google account you should make a value judgement yourself on if the extra convenience/features on Vanced is worth the risk over NewPipe.
I personally use a different mail provider so I don't have much sensitive information on my Google account, basically just using it for YouTube and Play Store.
There is also Bitchute and Hooktube, if you want to get at Youtube videos without using Google more than absolutely necessary.
But.
NewPipe allows downloading the videos which is great. Sharing video function in Vanced allows using NewPipe for download directly from Vanced application.
Perfect for podcasts: run playlist in background at x2 with "skip silences" on.
Is anyone familiar with youtube.videodeck.net / pockettube? Aggregates channels into subscription columns like RSS. Like old youtube collections. I've been using the service for years and have yet to see anyone else replicate the feature.
What it misses from a usual RSS reader is the notifications (idk maybe they exist and you only have to turn them on) and the "read"/"viewed" marker.
I imagine this will be an unpopular opinion here though.
Regarding ads: Showing ads like "Girl Mobile Video Talk" with description "Girl Mobile Number Live Video Call" with "Install Link" in a youtube ads is unacceptable. And the worst thing is you cannot even turn off that ads without being turning on ads personalization.
Regarding Money: 10$ may be a cup of coffee for you but in other side of world people are earning 200$ of salary so they just can't afford it. So many people don't have privilege like average Americans have?
Regarding supporting creators. Sure ads pay creator but showing ads every 10minute , beginning of video and end of video is total BS. And even creator are already using their own ads like "This video is sponsored by Brilliant.org" so I don't mind blocking ads.
With their resources and the nature of the service, they could easily win the cat-and-mouse game against ad-blocker devs if they wanted to.
The reason they don't, is because they actually want to keep those "entitled people" on their platform, in order to avoid giving competing platforms an opening to grow their own communities. They know there is a substantial part of their userbase who would simply not use their service if they had to either pay or endure the vanilla experience.
I mostly use YouTube to discover niche content, but only because I've been running an ad-blocker since forever. I cannot fathom how anyone could enjoy it in any other way currently. When I see how IT works at friend's houses I'm horrified.
If YT blocked access for browsers with ad-blockers (or make it inconvenient enough) I would essentially stop using it.
You're supporting them just by using them, whether they are showing you ads or tracking you or not. You're reducing demand on other platforms for this content because you're letting YouTube provide it for you. If you really want to stand against YouTube, don't use it. Otherwise, you're still supporting their platform, you've just decided to do so in a way that saves you time, money and convenience at the expense of YouTube and the content creators on YouTube.
If you're going to do it, you might as well own it.
I guess it's too easy for me to continue using YT for discovery.
It's similar to disliking Walmart and Amazon but still using them because they are cheap, convenient, a known factor, etc, which many do (including me, in the case of Amazon). The first step is acknowledging the trade-off you're making and being aware of it. At least then people are making a conscious choice, so if they want to re-evaluate at some point, they can do so with better facts.
OMG.
Whereas YouTube is a toxic cesspool, the others are blackhole hellmouths leading directly to eternal damnation. Meaning the wannabe's complete abrogation of their responsibilities show that YouTube's pathetic attempts at content moderation are better than nothing.
I now think there's an opportunity for white label video hosting.
I just saw an ad from "Epoch Times" (Scientologists?) about the COVID-19 hoax.
I'm gobsmacked. YouTube is pure unfiltered evil.
Moderation wise, I don't make any kind of distinction between content and ads.
I forgot that I turned off ad blocking. I guess I normally don't see this kind of shit.
If I'm watching an hour long video about X, and I have to watch 40 mid-roll ads, I'm way more likely to turn it off. I'd much rather directly support creators via Patreon, and Adblock everything else.
Since when is that an unreasonable ask?
Nobody uses youtube because they love it. Everyone uses youtube because google effectively killed all the competition by sliding billions of investor money to DMCA backers. And well, this one time it worked out nice for them, i guess. But it is not a business practice I will support. Fortunately, i'm technical enough to play their cat and mouse game to consume creators who are hostage to their monopoly on discovery.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23880582
It's a whole different matter when you can pay, the service provider asks you to pay and then you release an app that deliberately bypasses that ask.
YouTube is asking that their users either watch ads or pay money. That's how YouTube and creators can keep the lights on. I think that's a fair model. There are other models, like Vimeo, where the uploader pays for the hosting.
It certainly seems like the future is one where we expect access to everything and pay for nothing. That worries me.
/soapbox
Creators do get the lion share of YouTube's gross revenue.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/03261...
Fuck YouTube.
nowadays, if you want to pay for a newspaper article or a video, you have to fork over all your pii and oblige yourself to paying a certain sum in the future unless you do something to cancel it.
there is no fairness in commerce any more. they treat us like hostiles, and we have to treat them like hostiles.
the current choice isn't between paying for it or pirating it, it's between handing over your identity and future income or actively hiding.
one party to this commercial transaction doesn't need to eat and has an income the size of hundreds of thousands of the other side.
NewPipe doesn't need to be trusted where Google actively requires you to trust them - yet repeatedly acts untrustworthily.
If they want me to happily give them money, let me do it without trusting those who do not deserve my trust. I shouldn't have to trust corporations.
I 100% agree that personal data has unfortunately found its way into a transaction in which it should not belong. I respect the fact that you push back on this point, though I do find "treat them like hostiles" as an extreme position. Other entities offer transactions that I find abhorrent, and I simply just refuse to interact with them.
If paying for physical media (be it movies or newspapers or anything else) with "coins" is still valuable to you, I encourage you to continue to practice that behavior, and encourage others as well. It is still mostly possible in many cases.
> ...Google actively requires you to trust them... ... I shouldn't have to trust corporations.
Regarding YouTube, you can still interact with them in a trustless environment. Browse in incognito mode in a non-Google browser. Google gets to show an ad to an anonymous user and you get to watch a video. End of transaction.
I mean, the creator should have its share, but it's not like YouTube does nothing.
Yes, that happens.
Otherwise, there's no issue with YouTube getting add money.
But they're not - they're like one of those re-released Android Play Store apps which are hacked to provide paid features for free.
NewPipe is not a re-release of any Android Play Store app, or like any hacked app (like YouTube Vanced). It provides features beyond even YouTube Premium's featureset, removes perceived anti-features like Google Play Services integration, and is much more lightweight to boot.
It is a mistake to assume that everyone blocks ads because they do not want to watch ads. In my case, it is playing a game of damage control with a major corporation that has the ability to connect my activities across much of the web. Other people legitimately point to the cost of bandwidth. I am sure that other reasons exist.
It is also to the benefit if creators if they diversify their revenue streams. At the moment, they are far too dependent upon decisions made by Google. Some have realized this by requesting donations from users, merchandising, baking in ads from sponsors, and promoting alternate distribution mechanisms. While seeking out other sources of revenues creates problems for people who are just starting out, it is pretty much a necessity for people who are seeking to earn money from their work.
Watching content on YouTube while blocking ads does not encourage creators to go to other platforms. You've already consumed their product, thus lessening demand, so there's less reason to put it on another platform. It's not likely you'll go watch it on Vimeo after they upload it there when you've already seen it on YouTube.
Creators may be better off with a donation and merchandise revenue stream. Describing your actions as "benefitting" them by helping them see this by depriving them of revenue from you for their content is a slightly odd take though.
The claim was that creators would benefit from diversifying, not that my actions were benefiting them. I was quite clear that my motivations were related to Google.
I don't like it one bit -> down vote
I actually ended up going down a different route and created my own F-Droid repository for NewPipe and a couple other apps so I could get faster updates for them and I trust the upstream developers.
https://garykim.dev/blog/2020/04/14/personal-f-droid-reposit...
https://newpipe.schabi.org/FAQ/
It's one thing to hate a company and refuse to use their products and a whole nother thing to promote products that sidestep features the service asks money for.
With that I have almost exhausted the list of ads that Google thought has been relevant for me since I started dating my wife well over a decade ago.
Why they cannot show ads for family holidays, programming conferences, local stores etc I don't know but if I had to guess I'd say they could need some diversity on their teams ;-). (Adding a few married parents with stable marriages and small children should do the trick, but I am not interested and haven't been for a couple of years, I find Google close to disgusting sometimes and whatever technical edge it has has disappeared to the degree that I'm positively surprised to just see sane results like they used to be in 2007.)
The corollary of that is that any interaction with such a company is unethical, since it encourages them to continue the manipulation on people who may not be as aware or resistant.
I therefore assume you've routed YouTube.com to :: ?
For a number of years I allowed them to run JS on my device and download ads from other servers to my device.
I have now instructed my rendering device to not do that. Even as a devout christian that doesn't feel unethical.
I'm free to try to avoid the ads, they are free (within limits) to get me to view ads.
A pro tip in that regard would be to make the ads relevant and unobtrusive.
A good first step here would be to include them statically on the server side and make sure they don't contain any moving or noisy elements.
Another good idea would be to select ads not solely on what company they can fleece for most money by showing me irrelevant ads but also factor in if the ad is in any way relevant.
https://curiositystream.com/legaleagle/
Some content creators on YT (such as Legal Eagle, etc.) are also now on Nebula. $15 USD per year right now. Apparently they don't have to worry so much about de-monetization, however that works.
Google should, at least in theory, treat users of NewPipe same way it treats browser users with adblock.
So next time you see a YouTube employee, thank them for that
Do you have a source or a more detailed explanation for that?
Adblock Plus for example uses EasyList by default, and that contains this rule to block the ads:
Your claim might still be correct if google keeps that class name to avoid breaking adblockers (considering most other class names on google properties are randomly generated and change each week)This may be right, so host based adblocking may not work.
However, uBlock origin etc definitely block youtube ads and it works as a browser extension so they have access to the DOM and probably do something there.
I have two YouTube accounts, and at first it only happened on one. Now it is happening to both. Maybe it is something they are currently just testing.
I could be mistaken but I don't think YouTube officially permits third-party clients of any sort. Perhaps that's a good litmus test.
I wish:
* the playlist was easily accessible from the left pane drawer
* autoplay was easily toggleable from the playlist view
* the automatically added title wouldn't be a regular title in the playlist before it's played (a bit lower and grayed, and adding items would do so above that title)
* the playlist would show various options for the next automatic title.
But nowadays, I don't really want to invest time in the Android ecosystem, especially as I think I'll switch my daily driver to a PinePhone soon enough. The desktop equivalent is freetube, I think.
Thank you.
The people that created pocketcast implemented the same feature and as I remember it it is pretty wild implementation wise.
NewPipe is a great app, lighter on system resources than the official YouTube app, free & open-source, and a joy to use especially if you're overwhelmed by the serious UI "bloat" that YouTube has been suffering from in recent years. In addition to being ad-free, in many other ways is it a superior video-viewing experience.
As for the experience being very different on premium: I recently had to use YT on a browser without uBlock/uMatrix and I believe I got a taste of that difference. Scary stuff, not sure how people cope with all the shit being thrown at them.
The trust in google not taking away my contacts, spying on my position, requiring to have their gms on my phone (which will further grab as much of my data they can have) is virtually zero.
And with a very good and well known couse.
Personally I think the real value add of Youtube Premium is the ability to offline videos in the official app; that's not something the browser can normally do. Well, and the secondary effect of contributing somewhat to creators, even if the payout isn't significant through that channel. It's nice for it to be automatic and not require an explicit subscription.
At this point pretty much all comments saying that this is bypassing paid features are downvoted into oblivion and grayed out, so what exactly are you talking about?
Yet, here we are...
The part they marked "/s" was sarcasm, the sibling comment isn't saying otherwise.
B: no, all bad comments about NewPipe are being downvoted
A: the votes have changed since I posted it so my comment is no longer relevant
Tell me again how they missed the obvious sarcasm.
From the HN Guidelines[0]:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a YouTube/Google employee, just someone who cares a lot about preserving the quality of discussion HN is known for.)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Anything that can be interpreted even the slightest in favor of Google/YouTube is automatically downvoted by the HN mob. If anything, this thread is a prime example of that.
I use YouTube frequently, but I almost always just watch my subscriptions.
By not having a login system, it is basically rendered useless despite how nice it is to be ad-free and having a much cleaner UI
(I knew you can import subscription, but I sub and unsub channels constantly so it becomes a pain very quickly.)
I'm currently using YouTube Vanced instead.
To get the official Google token, you must go through a massive wad of obfuscated JavaScript in a browser VM. It uses a thing called "BotGuard" for which barely any information is available online to prevent automated logins, and apparently the code changes on every request to the login form. I know this from poking around at the page source and seeing a blurb advertising their credential security division slipped in at the top, like they just know that the only way you're getting that token is if it's exactly how Google and that security division wanted you to, and they felt the need to inform everyone attempting to reverse engineer the thing by looking at the source what they think of their effort.
This is the reason why we don't have Google login in another unofficial YouTube frontend called invidious[1] and youtube-dl[2].
That's right, not even youtube-dl can handle logging in to YouTube since about April 2019. That was about the time that Google apparently got around to patching their auth endpoint so you have to run their obfuscated JavaScript if you want in. Since then scores of issues reporting 400 responses from trying to download Watch Later or private playlists were posted on youtube-dl's tracker, collected in the issue I mentioned. Their response? Close it as a duplicate without, well, any other response. None as of present writing, eight months later. Exactly the same response as nearly every other issue reporting the same error.
That is a misstep on youtube-dl's part, and has greatly affected my impression of the project's leadership, but part of me also thinks that they don't want to admit that it's nearly impossible to get past a system Google specifically designed to be impossible for third-party clients to get past.
[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/754
[2] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/23860
Just a thought: maybe it could add a function to just sync user's subscriptions via scraping their user page? Of course this requires you to make it public, but at least it would provide an additional option.
Using NewPipe is just crossing your fingers and hoping they never decide to make use of those two pieces of information.
The last 3 years I've been very happy with "YouTube Vanced", in particular because of: background play, native adblocking, fully native logged in experience if desired, AND it switches to audio only encode if background play is enabled so it saves data.
Get it here: https://vanced.app/
They do. No one keeps them from charging for their work.
why hasn't anyone built a fully-featured desktop Youtube front-end experience? With, like, borderless floating video (a la Firefox's floating video feature), dimming the desktop, a search experience that doesn't bombard you with clickbait garbage, etc?
it seems like Youtube.com is really just a fancy mp4 player, targeting static video content.
does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing? What's their stance on them? Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?
If your referring to Picture in Picture, it was implemented for Chrome via an official extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/picture-in-picture...
Not really, no. Though they took some kind of legal action against Hooktube I remember.
> Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?
They already do this to some extent for videos with copyrighted content, but it's not very aggressive and has long been reverse-engineered and dealt with. They use a series of three string transformations like reversal, replacing a single letter, etc. on an alphanumeric signature parameter. The sequence of transformations varies per video but can be extracted from the Javascript source using regular expressions.
Here are some available clients I know of. I do not know if there any that use floating videos or dim the desktop as you say:
mps-youtube (terminal-only): https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer
FreeTube (which uses the invidious API): https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
Invidious: https://invidio.us/, https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
youtube-local (my project): https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local
smtube: https://www.smtube.org/
Minitube: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube, https://github.com/flaviotordini/minitube
It's an invaluable resource and until there's something better taking the ads away takes part of their income away.
If you'd ever work on anything close to video streaming industry you'd find out that the costs of delivering video to the world is massive. And paying for those services is how you make them sustainable (and add competition).