I use NewPipe frequently. It's rumored that Vanced was sent a cease and desist (which seems pretty likely). Out of curiosity, what are the chances that NewPipe will face the same fate?
C&D is almost certainly what happened. The wording of the tweet makes that clear, as they aren't attributing it to something like someone leaving the team.
I find it so irritating that Google essentially exists as a giant scraping system and they have the legal ability to persecute anyone taking content hosted on their platforms. Hypocrisy should be a legal defence in my opinion, i.e. if you take public content and repurpose it for your own needs you shouldn’t be allowed to sue for the same reason.
So you’re saying it’s fine to be a hypocrite as long as the corporate structure absolves you of direct liability? As the sibling also points out, YouTube was directly founded on illegal content.
If I remember right, Vanced is the official YouTube app that was decompiled and modified. Where newpipe is an open source standalone app that uses no Google code or apis.
They'll just update an endpoint and break access. Integrations require constant maintenance because the big tech companies don't care much for legacy support. Well, any kind of support at all, really.
Sorry to shit on this, but NewPipe sucks. In my experience it's a waste of time to try and use it as a YT client replacement. It barely works, if at all. Casting definitely never ever worked for me, not even once.
The user experience is unfamiliar and seems significantly worse than Vanced.
Vanced is what the official youbutt app should've been. RIP.
Maybe but Vanced was undeniably easier to use and transition to if you were used to the official app. I knew totally tech illiterate people using the app specifically because there was 0 difference with the official app. Once they just got it installed by someone they knew everything just worked and it was easy to update. Very very different from newpipe, which barely even has support for basic features like subscriptions.
FYI it's a reference to something else. He's basically calling you a fed/gov shill. It's a reference to glow in the dark CIA agents that schizophrenic late programmer Terry Davis claimed were following him. So it turned into a meme, and now glowie means fed/3 letter agency/police and saying that something glows means it's shady. I dont know how he got that from your comment.
(A comment that "glows" would usually be something like: hey fellow members of radical political ideology, who is up for letting those politicians know what lead tastes like? Let's conspire to commit domestic terrorism!" )
Rather than just dis, could you be specific? It works for me, and I know a number of people who use it since they find it is better for them than the official client.
I've found it very flaky in the past. Half the time it can't load a video or it crashes while playing the video. I'd understand if some of the issues came from being throttled the way yt-dl does, but the Android user agent that my phone has (which is the workaround that yt-dlp uses right now to be unthrottled) should present unthrottled downloads. I have a better experience having a service running on my seedbox which downloads and serves a Youtube video than using Newpipe, which says something.
The app has been very stable for me for years now. It breaks every so often when YouTube changes its APIs, but the devs are quick to update it, so it rarely inconveniences me for long.
- Video playback breaks regularly and it takes 4-5 days for fixes to hit F-Droid. This is waaaay too slow.
- Random other stuff keeps breaking, not that the 100+ lines of recursive Java gibberish in the crash popups tell you what broke (but the crash reporter itself does break regularly, too)
- App structure is counterintuitive: You have tabs on the main screen, and the side bar... duplicates the tab buttons, but turns the tabs into overlays that disable search and other functions? What?
- Content discovery is a mess: I cannot search specific channels. I cannot sort results. I cannot access channel playlists. It's always faster to open a browser and use the youtube website for this, even on mobile.
- Content organization is a mess: I cannot sort anything, period. Nor can I filter (e.g. to filter out videos already watched, or filter for videos started but not finished, ...), or bookmark specific videos, or do anything else with the content.
- Speaking of already watched videos, tracking progress isn't reliable.
- A few updates ago, video playback was turned into a multi-stage procedure, and now I need 3+ clicks to exit a video that already finished playing. What?
- Video overlay UX is horrible. I don't even know what details to go into, nothing about it is intuitive and I ended up crashing Newpipe a few times just trying to exit it (or go back to regular view), and I gave up on ever trying to use it.
And so on and so forth. That's just off the top of my head.
NewPipe works if you're subscribed to a small amount of channels that update rarely, and you go watch each video when it comes out, so you don't lose track of what's where and what you watched, and don't mind the occasional youtube-free week. For anything else it breaks down quickly, and hard.
If you're, like me, subscribed to a dozen channels that have backlogs in the hundreds of videos to go through, it's a nightmare. I force myself to use it to minimize my exposure to YT's website/client, but I am not enjoying the experience and cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.
I'll just note that you first issue, with updates being delayed by 4-5 days is a general F-Droid issue and not specific to NewPipe.
The delay exists, because F-Droid builds every application on their own server and that takes a while.
You could search for an alternative repo that just pulls the apk from github (maybe Izzydroid?), or host one yourself.
If you install their APK manually it can notify you when there's an update, and just a tap to download the new APK. There's also an offical newpipe repo you can add to f-droid.
If the casting isn't meant to actually work, it'd be great if the devs would get rid of the button...
Sorry, but until such things are rectified, New Pipe is a hell no for me; -10/10, worse than vanced, cannot recommend sharp-edged user-unfriendly software. Even when it's OSS and privacy friendly.
For a similar case, see gnuPGP. We all know how that one ended up not saving the world :(
I should specify I was talking about chromecast specifically - I think it may support other protocols.
That being said, I can't find the cast button you're talking about.
I also can't find the sharp edges you mention[0] could you give other examples? In my experience I've just had it do what it says on the box with no fuss.
[0] though I'll admit my tastes are minimalistic and I avoid cloud tools as much as possible - either or both of those may color my views.
For example, I see not having access to Youtube account information as a positive.
Bar about a day when youtube-the-site made an update that broke newpipe's parsing, I've never seen the first two.
There's a history tab, I don't really use ot but looking over it now it looks decent, and can sort by most and last played.
The only issue I've had with search is that it doesn't return playlists, but my typical flow is to go to the profile page and follow a link from there so it hasn't bothered me.
Just as another data point, I use and enjoy NewPipe, but definitely experience the first two points listed above- I get crashes and failures to load not infrequently.
Perhaps a hardware issue, or NewPipe handles spotty connections poorly or something.
> Because casting requires usage of Google API's and NewPipe is privacy oriented.
Do you happen to have a link to a GitHub issue or some other background? I'd like to learn more about this, I was under the impression cast-type devices (including Chromecast) usually implement DLNA which should be interface-able without any proprietary APIs. This is just from vague readings and recollections though.
Thanks for digging that up Shared404 (btw, cool HN profile, though I can't figure out what is "PFY"?)
Is the biggest challenge really in providing an AppID? I must be missing something because that doesn't seem like a big privacy concern or technical hurdle, which brings us back to no traceable logical problem other than "it's hard to do and I don't get paid for this" (which would be a fair position for an OSS maintainer to take).
Maybe the should look at how VLC streams to Chromecasts, because at least in the case of VLC, it's FOSS and sort of works.
The PFY is a reference to a character (the "Pimply Faced Youth") from The Bastard Operator from Hell [0]! I'm just starting out my career, so it felt appropriate.
My understanding is that they mostly didn't want to do anything more involved with Google than scrape a webpage and write an Android app - though I'm not on the team and haven't participated and couldn't say for sure.
I think they have looked at VLC - there's a lengthy workaround lower in the thread via VLC, but I've not read that part in depth.
The newPipe app did identify the usual cast targets on my local network, but everything went downhill from there. It's a shame that this sort of nonsense has wasted the time of many a user and not contributed to a happy new eco system.
Maybe now that Vanced is toast, someone will step up and lay the pipe into newPipe to get it working properly? Is this just wishful thinking? We need a hero..
A great issue for me with NewPipe is the fact that it does not support signing into an account. The developers claim it's a feature that will not be implemented.
Without the great music recommendation system I might as well just listen to my Jellyfin song collection. What value does YouTube even have without recommendations?
Yeah NewPipe is a privacy oriented client, like FreeTube or Invidious or Piped, so I don't think they will ever implement sign in[1]. In this sense, NewPipe is not a Vanced replacement.
[1] some of these clients have their own sign in, but you are not signing into your actual YouTube account and you don't get recommendations from YouTube.
At least for videos I use google spread sheet script to manage a bunch subscriptions into different private playlists accessible via sharelinks in Newpipe with psonsorblock. Allows me to keep things in sync with youtube account on other devices.
Each person uses it differently. I hate YT recommendations, they just promote whatever pays better, including low quality and simply incorrect content ("science"). All I'm using for years is a flat list of channels. I've been able to remove more from the list, then I add, and still use youtube as a substitute of a TV.
Lack of sign in in NewPipe was a positive change for me.
As others have noted, NewPipe lacks a lot of functionality, polish, and just generally breaks far too frequently. I'm in the tech industry so I can deal with the app breaking occasionally, but during my stint using it, it was almost every month that it broke. My girlfriend who has some technical knowledge just gave up on it because it was too frustrating that it kept breaking, and not only that, the devs urged users to download from GitHub instead of F-Droid.
I'm glad to hear your experience has been pleasant - ours has been far from it. Imagine telling someone who perhaps doesn't know what an "executible" is, to just allow unknown apps and go to a website and download a different app store (F-Droid), then go to that app store and download a third party app. Then when it breaks, tell them to go to GitHub and download another unknown app because the version on F-Droid gets updated too slowly when they just want to watch a video.
Vanced was not open source, supposedly to avoid angering Google by openly sharing the mod. Not sure how that makes sense though now that I think about it
You should be allowed to distribute your own code. The Youtube app itself is Google's intellectual property so I understand why they did that. I hope they can release the mods so we the users can apply them to the app ourselves
There isn't really a "source code" per-se for Vanced, they took the official YouTube app, decompiled it, applied hacks and recompiled it - pretty much very much the same way we hacked key checks and CD copy protections back in the day.
So if there's anything resembling source, it's more of a diff of a certain YouTube app version you can't just cleanly upload somewhere or even apply to new versions.
The lines of code that were generated are copyrighted by the person who wrote them, so they probably can't be DMCA'd easily. The offsets (and possibly the algorithm for finding those offsets) are harder to protect, of course.
The problem, of course, is that bogus DMCA claims are enough to take down a repository, and protesting those DMCA claims will dox you to the big tech companies.
Every time a project like this goes down, I feel more like there should be some kind of Gitea server hosted on a hidden service where "illegal" projects like these can be developed.
> Every time a project like this goes down, I feel more like there should be some kind of Gitea server hosted on a hidden service where "illegal" projects like these can be developed.
While not a Gitea server per se (GitLab instead), git.rip used to be a well-known host for pirated content, leaked source code, and various other things. If I remember correctly, the amount of content on there was in the hundreds of terabytes, which would have made it very hard to externally archive (not even taking into account bandwidth restrictions).
Other projects like this on Android extract the official APK, then patch it and resign it on the device. Distributing the actual APK was a technical decision that now bit them.
Seeing as we are probably due for reduced rights (e.g. pay a subscription to listen in the background) and inflated fees for those rights, it would be interesting to develop some kind of distributed way for people to (basically anonymously) develop these binary hacks i.e. you effectively have a git-in-2005 model where all nodes (patches) are equals but some more equal than others.
Reminder for similar projects: Don't promote it over the internet. If people want to find it, they will do so eventually. Share it peer to peer instead.
Surprised it took so long to be honest. It was so good and unlike with other youtube alternative clients, you basically had almost 1:1 feature parity over the official app. Plus you had the option to disable almost all the recent UI changes easily and a sponsorblock integration.
It was much much more of a threat to Google than newpipe or less "normie" friendly alt clients, and it was getting too popular for it's own good. I'm wondering if the current Vance releases will keep working for a while, or if Google will try to target those too by breaking something in their backend.
Oh I don't disagree that Vanced was probably breaking a few copyright/IP laws so Google sending a C&D would be well within it's legal rights. But I'll just say that I enjoyed it while it lasted
Many features existed in Vanced before YouTube pulled a bait and switch on users and put existing functionality such as background playback behind a paywall. Also, they explicitly refused to add support for things such as downloading videos, even though that also has perfectly valid non-piracy use cases.
(The YouTube Premium download feature is bad anyway because videos downloaded that way are artificially DRM-protected when the original streams are DRM-free can be downloaded using something like yt-dlp.)
Having come to adulthood in the 90s we all agreed that intellectual property was an oxymoron. It strikes me as odd people worry about the business model of mega corporations. Is it a sense of fairness? I have that instinct, but it doesn't apply to the likes of faang entities.
I shouldn't try to speak for a whole generation, you are right. The background of being told it was legal to tape movies from tv and songs from the radio and trade them, as long as we didn't charge money, and then when the BBSs and then internet apeared being told those rules didn't apply anymore made many of us decide we were not responsible for technology invalidating the business model of corporations that shared so little with those whose creations they profited from. The legality of it meant little given its unenforceable nature.
Can you explain what you mean? I certainly wouldn't conflate copyright infringement with theft, that was propaganda by riaa and crew that was far more successful than I thought it would be when they started it. And depending on jurisdiction time-shifting (recording for later) isn't copyright infringement.
replace youtube app with photoshop and you quickly realize that obviously it is illegal to modify and distribute. just because it is free to use doesn't mean intellectual property laws and licenses don't apply to it. you can argue that you think that intellectual property laws are stupid, but it doesn't make it any less illegal.
If you open up a shop where you do this (for free) I kind of think you ask to be sued. At any rate real world analoga often don't do the digital problems justice.
PS.: I imply that the "beep" is the source of revenue of course, which is a bit hidden in your analogon.
I have no idea why modding a microwave at a third-party service center would be illegal.
Yes, the rules for digital should be changed to be more alike the physical world, especially regarding ownership, resales, lending/borrowing and modification.
> I have no idea why modding a microwave at a third-party service center would be illegal.
If you remove the source of revenue for a given product without consent of the manufacturer/developer of that product and do this in a professional fashion, you are inflicting severe damage to that manufacturer/developer of a product.
The reason why digital problems are not easily transferred to the real world or back is in this example, that it costs the author of that mod zero time to do it for all people at once (developing time is fixed) and is accessible nearly instantly from everywhere. This is certainly not true for the microwave example.
edit: replace owner with manufacturer/developer (of that product)
Just a nitpick, the word it's does not imply possession, you are looking for 'its'. If you cannot substitute your usage of it's with 'it is' then it is the wrong one to use.
Well, for a period of time in "middle english", it was spelled "whos". Ultimately derived from the genitive singular form of Old English hwa, "hwaes". In OE the -es suffix marked the genitive case in strong masculine nouns.
Eventually, the form become generalized across all nouns, with -es being applied to any noun to indicate possession. In most cases, the e is silent, and typographers began to either omit it (e.g. "whos") or, eventually, replaced it with an apostrophe, as the French did. And I suppose "whose" gained an e to indicate the "long vowel".
So we've ended up in a situation where we've basically lost noun declension and just attach suffixes to indicate plurality and possession (s and 's), but our pronouns have inherited their old declensions, without the -es/-'s suffix attached.
Granted, "its" is itself a semi-recent invention, as OE and middle english used "his" for both masculine and neuter third person singular genitive pronouns.
And yet, english is quite happy to have an overlap between contraction and possessive for nouns, like "The doctor's waiting" vs "The doctor's waiting room"
Possessives were the weird ones for me. I learned French at an early age, and you were just expected to learn the possessive pronouns. I did the same for English and while `it's` and `its` are similar, I've always considered the latter as its own thing, not something extrapolated from using the apostrophe as a possessive in English.
Thanks, I always get confused about this and believe it or not, I almost majored in English!
Even trying to query Google for the correct rules for it's/its doesn't turn up clear, concise information as you've achieved here in two sentences. Tragically, it's another case of SEO'd to death.
>Thanks, I always get confused about this and believe it or not, I almost majored in English!
Just remember this[0] and you should be set:
It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its,
if you mean it is.
If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't
her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise
yours and theirs.
> Even trying to query Google for the correct rules for it's/its doesn't turn up clear, concise information as you've achieved here in two sentences. Tragically, it's another case of SEO'd to death.
Here is the simple rule I use: in English, pronouns never use an apostrophe for the possessive.
He --> his
She --> her
They --> their
We --> our
I --> my
You --> your
It --> its
(Since someone will probably point this out, this is only true of the common pronouns. There are unusual pronouns that have apostrophes in their plurals. Eg: one --> one's. But nevertheless, the rule worked for me.)
As a native speaker I am well aware of that, but my typing muscle-memory is to some degree phonetic and on autopilot. So I sometimes reread what I wrote and discover I used e.g. 'two' instead of 'too'. It's/its is another common one.
Oh wow. So, is this a common thing? When I type without thinking about it too much, and with my typing not being able to keep up with my brain, I tend to make those errors a lot. But I thought it was just me being dumb and not some general thing that happens to people.
I also sometimes put in an entirely incorrect word that is vaguely like the one I intended, with amalgamated hints of a neighbouring word, usually the one after. My brain just melds them together. Sometimes I read what I write and wonder how on Earth I can be such an idiot. Blessed are those times I catch such fuckwittery before posting.
- ed
the its/it's one is really annoying though, because of course I KNOW which is correct, but sometimes my finger just slips and sneaks in that apostrophe.
Funnily enough, I never have that issue with its/it's. Maybe because I’m not a native speaker and sometimes actually confuse them until my spellchecker reminds me ;)
And yeah, I sometimes created melded words as well. I wonder if there’s a name for our issue.
I'm surprised they did not have a plan for this. I thought Vanced would be based in a more "rebel" country like Russia, which is what Sci-Hub does. A Cease and Desist letter from Google would be meaningless there. Were they trying to pull this off in the USA, or other Western countries?
The number of people willing to put many months work into a project like this, with substantial legal risk, and no possibility of getting paid money, is very small.
And of that small set of people, the number who already live in Russia is even lower...
Is it necessary to actually live in Russia, though? If I ever managed a project like Vanced, or any other initiative that might trip a big company such as Google, I would definitely seek hosting on a country like Russia or similar, even though I am not there. That, and trying to run everything anonymously, not with my Github username.
I'm curious, where exactly are the Cease and Desist letters delivered, when they get sent? To whatever contact email appears in the project's website, if any?
If you don't go through the hassles of anonymously signing up with the hoster in Russia, and also paying them anonymously, then there isn't much point in this. As soon as the server can be traced back to you (in a way that convinces the court) you're toast.
In the end, it's not like the devs made any money off of this. If they weren't already in a Russia-like country, then it's not exactly reasonable to relocate for your side project you offer for free.
You do not need to frequently update the app to use youtube. For example with Vanced you may be using a several month old (modded) version of the app.
>do they ever break compatibility?
Yes, but I can't seem to easily find data on how often they do. I assume the "Currently installed versions will work just fine, until they become outdated in 2 years or so." is referring to how long they expect Google to keep compatibility with the latest version they used.
Unless you're a creator or an advertiser, I'm sure who why you'd be so against it, you can just not use it. It's not a "ripoff". It was just the official app with a bunch of mods applied. Ads blocked, sponser segments removed, dislike added and in general it had a bunch of UX improvements too. They never claimed it improved privacy or the recommendations. Those probably wouldn't be possible to improve anyway, since those are likely to be server side.
That's disappointing. I was in awe on how much better an alternative modded app was, when compared to the official one from Google, which supposedly has the "best" developers working on it.
Have you ever worked with decompiled apps? It's extremely hard. Even more props to Vanced. Yes like they are playing a game on "Hard" mode, while Google is on "Easy".
> supposedly has the "best" developers working on it.
they are the "best" at satisfying the corporate demands of google, rather than consumer's demand.
Vanced is very much focused on improving the user experience. Sad to see it go - i hope they leave behind a way for others to do this very same mod in a way that google cannot cease and desist.
For me, it made YouTube so tolerable that I would spend significant amounts of time on it. Sometimes I get the feeling that a side effect of adblockers is that they unintentionally act as enablers for addicting platforms.
At times, it's worth thinking about what you're using adblock to accomplish at a higher level. For me it was subjecting myself to YouTube's recommendations for several more hours per day.
Luckily I had found an opportunity to quit YouTube stemming from unrelated reasons, and in the process I uninstalled Vanced. On desktop I block the recommendations feed in case I come from an external link, and I would say it has saved me significant amounts of time.
Also, this shutdown serves as a reminder of the future we may start to find ourselves living in when ads served from first-parties and technologies like DoH become ubiquitous. It's going to be far harder than using uBlock Origin to block ads when you start to need something beyond the DNS layer outside of the browser ecosystem.
Years ago I drew a big red line in the sand for myself: no ads ever, for any reason, ever. If a service cannot fulfil this, I don't pay for it or use it. Makes the decision easy for me.
So does that mean you're paying for YouTube Premium (which explicitly stops showing ads when you give them those 10 bucks a month) or did you just move the goalposts here?
I can confirm that vanced had Google/YT eyes on it for many years now, or at least that someone I know on the Ad abuse team at Google was talking about them finding ways to stop vanced for years now.
To anyone out of the loop, Firefox Android has basically killed add-ons, similar to Chrome. This is why you have to go through 12 steps just to install a fucking addon.
The difference is in the bait and switch tactic they employ. They started by offering the service for free and without ads till there were no good competitors. And then they switched to showing obscene amount of ads. Most users and a good bunch of creators are unhappy about the way they ruin the viewing experience. If YouTube declared their true intentions at the beginning, we wouldn't be yearning for competent alternatives today. Greed is definitely the word.
I dislike ads as much as anyone, and I use adblockers aggressively. If I can't use something without regularly seeing ads, I usually stop using it.
With all of that said, Youtube operated at a loss for a long time, which is impossible for anyone but a government or a charity to sustain indefinitely. According to this article, Youtube was not profitable in 2015, nine years after Google bought it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...
I don't think "greed" makes sense as an insult directed at a for-profit corporation. It is by nature a machine to maximize shareholder value; it is nearly as amoral as its recommendation algorithm that tries to maximize watch time. Of course, letting machines run amok is dangerous and antitrust laws used to keep them in check, but not so much anymore.
YouTube has been running ads from the start and specifically video ads for 15 years. They've been paying creators via revenue share of those ads for 14 years. Something like 95% of the growth of that site has happened after the switch to video ads. The argument that it was a bait and switch seems pretty hard to justify.
This is a bit disingenuous because the ads from 15 years ago are very different from the ads today. Additionally, YouTube didn't even have ads (of any form) for the first few years and once they did roll them out, it was only given to specific creators who applied to be YouTube partners or people who were part of a network like Machinima or Maker Studio.
Today, there are pre-rolls, post-rolls, unskippables, multiple ads in a single ad segment, mid-rolls, etc. That's significantly more than the ads from years ago. Also, ads often supports copyright claimants instead of the actual content creators.
I always watch YT in firefox with ublock origin on, it seems to work 100%. It seems like pi-hole would work well too, but my router insists on providing a backup dns server when my pihole fails to find something... Need to go get a new one, preferably meshable.
There are a few ways to get your client devices to use the pihole:
- configure each client device accordingly (very inconvenient, but mentioning it for completeness)
- configure your router's DHCP service to tell clients that the DNS server is [IP address of pihole] instead of [IP address of router]
- configure your router's upstream DNS to be [IP address of pihole] instead of [what your modem offers] and leave the DHCP service alone (clients use the router as the DNS server)
I suspect you're using the third way, based on the issue you're having. Try the second way instead, so the router isn't even processing client lookups. (Maybe not all routers offer this. I use pfsense which does.)
Anyway, my pihole doesn't block YouTube ads... Can I remedy that?
It's not possible to block YouTube ads with pihole as they're served from the same address as the videos. Pihole does not inspect any content itself. That's why on a laptop/desktop you need ublock origin for the browser.
I've not found a solution for YouTube app on Android TV other than using Vanced! Not sure if Adguard for Android helps either.
The ads are so bad and so frequent in the YouTube app that I hardly ever use it.
Ah, yes. TOTP can't be primary 2fa and isn't even a choice unless you add sms 2fa. You can remove the sms method after, but still very sketchy and unfortunate.
You just install the vanced apk like any other apk. The manager app isn't really needed and since there will be no more updates it would be kind of useless.
Honestly YouTube should have a way to disable shorts in app. They're trying to pull an Instagram and stomp on TikTok's grounds, but it doesn't feel like it's working and it feels like how Instagram went from being a simple photo sharing tool to being a bloated mess with four major interfaces in one.
You say you don't feel like it's working, but that might just be because you're no longer part of the new generation and have a different expectation of what "video content" is. Like it or not, the Tiktok format is very popular, and while a large part of it is the recommendation algo, Google isn't exactly a slouch in that area.
I have it on good authority that Shorts is both experiencing steady growth and is the fastest-growing segment within Youtube-the-company.
I feel like it's objectively not working and this is coming from someone who's spent a good amount of time on both TikTok and YouTube Shorts. TikTok has an actual community of original content creators and people trying to remix content that other's have made using sounds, duets, and stitches. YouTube is mostly reposted TikTok content (which loses context due to the lack of sounds, duets, etc.) and clip aggregators who just repost clips from popular memes/viral videos/TV shows. They aren't even in the same ballpark in terms of quality.
If they offered a light version that was JUST ad-free YT, I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.
I already pay for two other music services and have no interest another one so the $20/mo is too steep for my blood (for the family plan).
YT apparently trialed a YT Premium Lite in Europe [0], which is at a price-point I'd be willing to pay (7 EUR). That's on par with what I'd pay for other streaming services, and that's probably 50% of my streaming source, especially with the amount of learning content on there. I'd probably be willing to pay up to $10 USD/mo for just ad-free YT.
But the other ~$10USD/mo for an unwanted service doesn't appeal to me.
Vanced was proprietary, it's too bad for users but I won't shed a tear for its developers and would actually advise against doing anything that keeps it living. The very fact that there is a need to get apk archives before the links die is an artifact of being proprietary and would not have been an issue with Libre Software.
The only way that makes sense for all of us as a democratic society is to keep control, and this can only be achieved through Libre Software. The real move right now is not to keep existing Vanced content on life support, but to use Newpipe. If it doesn't support the right features, fork it. Enhance it. Use it as the Common it is
What is the reason for the cease and desist? Code license or use of content? If it's the latter, then NewPipe won't survive either. We really need an alternative to YouTube, not another frontend to this exploitative platform.
Vanced didn't publish the letter, but I'd argue it was a code copyright issue. They applied patches to the original YouTube APK and then distributed it. If they had only distributed the patch diffs themselves and a tool to patch the user-provided YouTube app file, this wouldn't have happened.
Courts have interpreted derivative works to be so when at least some parts of it contain the original copyrighted work. If that test fails, the whole derivative work argument is null and void.
I wouldn't want to be the one with my neck on the line in court over this.
Consider that .torrent files also don't have the content, yet torrent sites which serve them and provide tracking for torrent clients are having to play cat and mouse with copyright holders.
There have been court cases on this. In Galoob v. Nintendo, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Galoob did not infringe copyright by distributing a device (the Game Genie) that allowed users to modify copyrighted video games. The case established, at the time, that modifying a computer program or other copyrighted work for personal use was fair use.
That said, so much of what we knew about copyright and software in the 90s has been overturned by subsequent rulings or even statutes (like the DMCA) that if you wish to avoid being burned by copyright suits, you must retain an attorney knowledgeable in this area of law. (Which is true in any case.) As an example, look-and-feel copyrights are back on the table thanks to The Tetris Company LLC.
I agree that a bunch of people who are all licencees of a software work should be able to exchange instructions with each other for how to modify that to work better for them; I'd like courts to see it that way.
These instructions do not increase the number of people who have copies of the work, and so no copying is taking place; copyright should not be applicable here. The licensor may argue that license clauses is being violated, but not copyright; i.e. the users are using the software in ways that they don't like (use is not copying or redistribution).
If I sold a transparency with nothing but a twirly mustache on it, sized & positioned so that it perfectly placed the mustache on the original Mona Lisa if placed within the frame, would that be a derivative work?
(Assume for this question that the Mona Lisa was currently protected by U.S. copyright.)
> If I sold a transparency with nothing but a twirly mustache on it, sized & positioned so that it perfectly placed the mustache on the original Mona Lisa if placed within the frame, would that be a derivative work?
To the extent that it's "based on" copyrightable expression in the Mona Lisa, yes. AIUI the key question is: would a viewer recognise the Mona Lisa from your transparency? And that would be a question of fact for the jury; personally guessing I'd say probably not from just the position of a mustache in a frame, probably yes if you included e.g. an outline of the pose. (In which case it might still be protected fair use, but it would be a derivative work, and you'd have to make that positive defence).
I don't get this argument against proprietary software. People building software should be able to expect payment for their work and effort.
Food is required for a healthy society but would anyone here advocate for farmers to give away all of their produce for free?
Text-tiles are necessary for society but would you advocate that clothing be provided by the creators free of charge?
The only thing different about software is that little to no physical resources are required as a prerequisite to its production, but an individuals time and energy is.
A world in which no one was paid to write software would be a world with much worse offerings than what we currently have and would be a net loss for humanity.
You seem to be under the impression that permissively licensed software is unable to be sold, nor developers financially compensated. This is not the case.
There are plenty of successful software companies whose offerings are not proprietary, yet manage to pay their developers well. Example products:
I don't know for MongoDB and Vagrant, but Docker and Elastic Search seem to me to be painted into a corner because of the non proprietary part of their business.
Seeing them succeed up to that point is already an incredible feat, and perhaps they will find a way to turn around with a bright future ahead, but at this point I wouldn't give them as clear examples of success of the business model.
Red Hat is IBM, so I'm not sure it fits in the list.
I agree with your point, but you picked stunningly bad examples. MongoDB and ElasticSearch are both fauxpen source, and Vagrant and Docker are both open core. The only one on your list that's really open source is Red Hat. Better examples would be Nextcloud and Grafana.
I think MongoDB and Elasticsearch should be examples of the opposite if anything. They tried to do the whole FOSS thing, but now both use "Server Side Public License", which is generally regarded as source-available, but not open source because of its restrictions.
They pay their employees well, though- the parent I replied to was implying one could not be paid well while writing software which is given away "for free". This is clearly not the case.
Just to understand where I'm coming from, I'm actually a proponent of all production being socialized so that people do not need to spend their life working just to live. Farmers would give their produce for free because all their needs would be met for free. But that's another debate.
Libre Software can totally be funded, through individual donations or through public funding; in fact, because Libre Software is a common, it is only normal that time spent improving them should be time paid by the entire society. I see no problem with the idea of taking from private property to further common property.
I've heard people who have similar beliefs to yours and IME they've never been able to rationalize what their society would actually look like and how we could maintain the same quality of life as we have today.
Given that HN is a higher quality social media platform than most, maybe today that can change. Would you mind answering a few questions:
1. Who does the hard/dirty jobs in this society? Farming being one. But also construction, sewage, trash, ad inifitum. There are a lot of undesirable jobs and while maybe some people would be willing, I doubt our needs could be met when the same individuals could just work an easier job for the same reward.
2. How are "needs" defined? Food, shelter, clothing. Then what? Electricity? Internet? Smartphones? Gaming consoles/PC's? Games to play on those? Music? Memory foam mattresses? Etc. If all of these aren't needs, then how would individuals with varying interests actually choose what they want to own?
3. What are the incentives to advance amd become highly skilled? Take doctors. Some are really passionate about what they do. Most may be a little passionate, but are mainly just intelligent people drawn by the money and prestige. Assuming medical school and university still exists, for what purpose would someone go through that pipeline when they could do something far easier?
Regarding point 1, how is "the people who we force to" an acceptable answer to this? Because that's exactly what happens now. No one wants to work hard, dirty jobs, but there is a societal pressure upon them to, and enough inertia to maintain the status quo that keeps a majority of them where they are.
Lol are you joking? I would wager my life that not a single blue collar worker in America takes or remains in a job that they hate out of societal pressure to do so. Having grown up in am environment where my social group was almost nothing but manual laborers, the only pressure they felt was financial. The difference between them and say, a SWE was often to some extent baseline intelligence coupled in with lack existing accreditation in terms of degrees or certification, and lack of motivation, interest and or ability to obtain such.
The suggestions that we as a society should basically just bully a certain number of people into undesirable positions is egregious and almost worse than blatant authoritarianism. At least today the people working those jobs are usually compensated better than they would be in another obtainable position given their skills amd ability.
I just feel like all this crying foul about authoritarianism is because people view certain roles, even the essential ones, as beneath them. If that mindset needs to be changed then I'm all for it. I don't deny that it will be hard, and I don't deny that I might be guilty of this myself.
They had to keep it so, otherwise the exploits they used to modify the app would have been right in the open and countered immediately. They did keep its package manager open-source. It's the same with cracked Spotify builds, the famous xManager is open-source but the cracked builds it summons aren't.
Is there a way to transform all those split packages into a single, simple to install .apk? (with a preselected architecture, and english lang)
If Vanced will keep working as-is for maybe a year or two, that's at least nice, I just would like to keep a copy of the latest version for reinstalling when my tablet is formatted in the next days...
What problems do you have with the official app? I normally have large list of complaints about video streaming services, and I don't have a single issue with the Android Youtube app
My big issue is the backgrounding. I like watching a video while cooking, but I also need to use timers. Not having the video stop and re-orient itself to portrait while I quickly set or dismiss a timer is excellent. I also find the UI during live streams to be borderline unusable on mobile.
Good news is Video Background Play Fix is among the (admittedly few) extension that are enabled in Firefox for Android [0]. No need to use the nightly version.
How badly Mozilla messed up with Firefox on Android is worth another topic, however.
> My big issue is the backgrounding. I like watching a video while cooking, but I also need to use timers. Not having the video stop and re-orient itself to portrait while I quickly set or dismiss a timer is excellent.
Background playback is a paid feature. You may disagree with that decision but the option is there if you wanted it.
Some videos have end cards which are super annoying and impossible to disable. Youtube Stories are stuffed in your face whether you like it or not because Youtube is competing with TikTok. Youtube doesn't think you understand numbers, so for video quality you can only choose Low Medium and High. There is no way to copy a video at a particular timestamp.
These are all solved by Vanced. Paying for Youtube premium does not solve any of these.
There's a trick to hide them. You know that gesture you do when watching a video vertically to minimize the video to get back to the video feed? While you're doing the gesture, the end cards are hidden. Just hold the gesture, and you can hide the cards.
Forced ads on mobile is just an experience I'd rather not deal with. If I didn't have them blocked on my main machine I could at least tab out and do something else in the meantime. Via mobile you can't really do that and it was enough to make me think twice about even bothering to use the official app before I got Vanced.
Add to those list of cons that I've been years hopelessly trying to educate YouTube to avoid showing me repeated videos or topics that don't interest me, but they don't care, as long as it increases "engagement", they will do as they please, not as you would.
Those are paid features. You may disagree with the pricing but I'm not sure if those are valid complaints when you're actual issue seems to be that you don't want to pay for these features (which is, of course, legitimate).
you cannot select a default video resolution - they either are in high quality, 1080p or higher, or pithy 360p, and every video you play resets it back to whatever the default. Same with the video speed - you cannot set a video speed, every time you play a video the speed resets back to 1x.
All of those above are possible via the website - it remembers your video's quality and speed preferences.
There are too many youtube stories shoved right in your face with the app - no way to disable it.
There is no way to disable the 'cast' button from the player - it's not very useful but you can easily fat finger it.
That's just the surface - i haven't even gotten to the ads, and the forced community posts etc.
I really don't understand what they were thinking. They made such a big deal of the site being mobile-friendly, yet it's unbelievably slow and laggy. It's a lot of marketing that quickly falls apart in practice.
It's not even fast on my Pixel 5 though, which is supposed to be quite powerful. It can handle other sites (and PWA's) fine! It's just the Twitter one that bogs everything down. Oh well.
It's not much of a length. It's set it and forget it. Way cheaper for me than $10 a month, that's a whole extra banana every month.
I shouldn't have to pay a monthly recurring charge to get some company to undo their kneecapping of how my hardware and software (that I own, outright, code and all according to GPL) works just because their business model isn't compatible with me being in control of what's mine.
It's no small thing, just brushing off $10 a month is hubris. For half the worlds population that's a third of their income. And for some of us other people, I don't want my money going to google, period. I don't care if it is 10 cents a month, I'm not paying a company to solve a problem they created on purpose in order to charge for the solution.
I pay for YTM, so haven’t ever tried any of these Adblocking things for YT. I think $10/mo is pretty decent for a music service and also the removal of all ads from YT (which includes their fairly decent library of free movies that would be ad-supported without YTM/YTP)
I also pay for Youtube Music/YT, but I exclusively use Vanced on my phone, as it integrates with Sponsorblock, locks in a set quality setting (unlike the actual YT app which keeps kicking me to 480p when it feels like it), removes a lot of the cruft on the home page, and as of recently shows downvotes.
I draw the line before sponserblock. At that point you are taking money directly from the content creators, not YT or other platforms.
I held out on blocking ads for some time, until it became impractical to avoid drive-by attacks other ways and the amount of stalking involved got _really_ creepy.
If sponsor segments irritate me enough that I'd consider sponsorblock then I choose between paying for the content directly (if a sponsor-free version is available that way) or just not consuming it (at least not from that source).
Sponsorblock looks pretty harmless as far as affecting creators getting paid, it doesn't seem to do anything that can't be replicated by hitting your right arrow key a couple times so weird place to draw the line in my opinion. Pretty sure sponsors can't tell if people fast forwarded through the sponsored section.
YouTube allows you to see the view drop-off at every second, so the creator of the video can see people skipping the sponsor section.
I’m guessing that sponsors probably look at click through or view count. I believe sponsors that care about views will ask to see this chart in the future if they don’t ask for it now.
Long term if no one buys the sponsorships will fall off.
> I'll never buy
Of course if you know with absolutely 100% certainty that you'll never buy or mention to others (you might not need/want a WidgitotronAsAService, but maybe someone you know asks about them later) anything ever mentioned in a sponsor spot, then no there is no loss (and I envy your clairvoyance).
I consider it a politeness to the content creators to not automatically skip the sponsor slots. I do manually ship the ones I've heard a few times already, but you never know if the next one might have some relevance. Unlike stalky ads, the sponsor slots have some chance of being relevant to what I'm thinking about while watching that particular clip.
I understand what you're trying to say but after watching the 972658th Raid Shadow Legends ad I just mash the right arrow as soon as I sense a segue to some sponsor because the chance that there's a good product behind a YT ad is around .3% and that's just not worth my time or attention
I don't understand your argument. Me not watching the sponsors doesn't affect any of the other viewers of that video. People clearly DO support the sponsors, and that's fine. I don't and never have, not from a moral position but that I've never seen one that resonates in any way with me. When I say I skip them, I usually stick around long enough to hear the name of the product being peddled.
IMO, quality wise, sponsored segments advertise better products than the YT ads. In most cases, they are tied to the video/creator and the creator talks and advertises them because they themselves use it. They feel a lot more organic and targeted than anything the YT algo ever showed me.
Well, another problem that I have is that I watch a lot of videos from US-based creators.
For me as a european, quite a lot of physical items which are being sponsored are not available in my country, so the ads for these are essentially useless.
The rest of the ads are VPNs(which I already got), various SaaS which I have absolutely no use for or things I already know (and don't want).
Online ads are already annoying and useless to me, but sponsored segments are even worse.
At least I don't feel bad for skipping these segments because AFAIK, creators just have to integrate these segments into the videos, that's it. The advertisers can't know if I've seen the segment so the creator gets paid the same, doesn't matter if I watch or skip it.
Isn't that a contradictory argument that it's okay to "take money" from platforms but not content creators? They are both service providers with the objective to earn revenue.
However, I do not believe that blocking ads is taking money from providers. I think if your business model involves displaying ads, you must factor in the cases where consumers are not interested in said ads. Otherwise where do we draw the line? What if the consumer is letting the ad shows but not watching it? Will we mandate eye tracking? What if the consumer is mentally tuned out? Will we mandate brain implants? What if the consumer takes a principled stance of never purchasing anything they see in an ad? Will we mandate consumers mandatorily convert a certain percentage of ads that are shown to them? It's gonna delve into absurdity and a consequential threat to human well being. I wish society could just reach a common ground that it's a fundamental right that people are allowed to block ads by whatever means they see fit.
> Isn't that a contradictory argument that it's okay to "take money" from platforms but not content creators? They are both service providers with the objective to earn revenue
On just that, yes.
But at least sponsor spots are just that, payment for advertising. They are not directly part of the global stalking networks. I don't object to advertising as a way of paying for things, I object to being followed around in everything I do.
It's a grey area. YouTube, for example, pays content creators out of their subscription revenue from YouTube Premium. When I watch a video, they're receiving some of this money, even if I skip their ads.
Further, if I manually skip the ads, how is that functionally different to automatically skipping the ads? What if I turn off audio or avert my eyes? Are you arguing that I should have my eyes and ears glued to the screen when the ads are playing?
I don't think I can happily pay $0.50 every day just to be able to keep listening to the news after I push the lock button on my phone.
I'd be happy to support youtube if they actually supported their community and content creators, but right now, my opinion on youtube itself is that it's hostile to anyone who needs to use it.
> I'd be happy to support youtube if they actually supported their community and content creators
YouTube Premium does support creators, 55% of your subscription gets split among the creators you watch. The more you watch a specific creator, the more they get from your subscription. I've seen some creators say they get more from Premium users than from ad-watching users.
YouTube Premium offers a number of features on top of ad-free viewing including access to an entire music streaming service. It's actually a marvel that only 45% covers this.
They could give 100% of their subscriptions to content creators and I still wouldn't call youtube a supporting environment.
Examples of youtube's hostility include removing dislikes to please ad companies under the guise of user safety, terrible account recovery processes and allowing copyright bots to shutdown channels by spamming claims because youtube has placed the onus of proof on copyright creators, and not the ones actually making the claims.
While YouTube still keeps a lot of your money when you pay for premium, you actually contribute more towards a creator if you watch with premium rather than ads[0].
I watch very little YouTube, probably <1h/mo on average but I continue to pay their $15 just so I don't have to see an ad. On desktop I can adblock but on mobile it sucks. I hate casting video (Chromecast) at a friends house and having to see an ad. For that alone I'll pay their stupid fee.
Valid statement. Especially considering the multiple $5 subscriptions that a lot of Twitch consumers shell out at those they watch, $10/mo to support _everyone_ you watch on YT plus getting the no ads and YTM isn’t really that bigga deal..
Content creators should create a patreon account or similar. YouTube is notorious for pulling the rug from under the creators. There is no shame in not wanting to fund it.
Many content creators do have Patreon accounts and I even support a few of them. But frankly I'm not going to subscribe to Patreon for more than a tiny fraction of the dozens of creators I watch on Youtube. I'd go broke.
Enabled the YouTube app to check it out and it's still trash. Quickly disabled.
It's not about the money- it's about respecting the user. The app is so full of garbage I won't pay for it. The day they shut down NewPipe is the day I just stop using YouTube on my phone and tv.
It's just a conveyor belt of bs. I can't disable comments, chat, etc. I don't care about uploading shorts. I'm tired of constant redesigns or moving things around. I just want to see videos related to what I search for or channels I'm subscribed to.
I instantly feel like I'm capital to be maximized rather than a respected user when I open YouTube.
Edit: While typing this they felt the need to use a push notification for some breaking news video. Add it to the pile of bullshit.
Comments under video are just a thin 50px tall bar, just don't click on it? Just like you don't have to scroll down on the web. Just fullscreen and watch your video.
> I don't care about uploading shorts
Then don't press the shorts button?
> I'm tired of constant redesigns or moving things around
I don't think youtube gets that much redesign. On android, the biggest recent changes are dark mode (optional), making comment section smaller actually, and the chip filtering system.
> I just want to see videos related to what I search for
Then use the search button, it does just that
> or channels I'm subscribed to.
There's a tab dedicated to subscriptions, and it only shows chronological order of videos from your subscriptions, nothing else. You can also filter by a specific channel, or by tags such as (today, unwatched, etc).
> a push notification for some breaking news video
All notifications can easy be blocked, either at the app or OS level. Takes 3 clicks.
Saying something like "just don't click on it" to someone who has opinions about a dopamine farming enterprise is like putting a cake in front of a morbidly obese person and telling them "just don't eat it", or putting some victimhood story in front of a redditor and telling them "don't re-assure them it wasn't their fault and they're not alone". You may be right, but it's not very effective is it?
It's designed for "growth and engagement" as opposed to being a tool to serve the user. Dark & addictive patterns, etc. Not to mention that it's still a privacy nightmare even if you pay for Premium.
Bums me out too...I've been so so disappointed by every change between GPM and YTP/YTM, but I can't pull myself away for anything else. Plexamp is fantastic, but it's not enough catalog for me (yet?), and Family is just too good of a value.
GPM had podcast integration. Being a cloud service, it synced state to all my devices.
Until last month, kids could not use YTM. With the family plan, this was basically a DOS for years (or setup new kids accounts and lie about their age).
IMO, GPM's recommendations were much better.
We kept the family plan because of YTP and my wife and I still had access to music.
I had no idea that existed. From my perspective, the feature vanished into thin air. I wasn't a heavy podcast listener so this was kind of a Google Reader situation; I simply stopped listening to podcasts.
I guess if you're a very casual podcast listener, and with the lack of proper migration path it can be confusing, but a dedicated Podcast app makes a lot more sense than the half-assed "podcast is music" integration that GPM had. If you've never tried it, a real podcast app is orders of magnitude better. Speed controls, feed management, silence trimming, auto download, archiving, etc.
The lack of kids support is very true. The free tier also was quite trash for a long time, and the lack of desktop casting. Most of these have been since fixed though and at this point I would say YTM has feature parity.
Recommendation is always hard to discuss as it's very subjective. That being said, YTM has great playlists. It automatically clusters your music into 7 playlists which is describes with 4-5 artist names. There's discovery, replay and new release mixes which are great too.
Overall, I agree GPM got shut down way too soon, but at this point YTM has made a lot of progress vs what it was 2 years ago.
I may be wrong, but I think Youtube Premium should still be available in countries without YTM, but at half the price since you don't get the music half.
It's not just ad blocking. There is a black theme which makes the background black instead of dark gray which is nice on an OLED phone. It also has the same brightness / volume controls as new pipe where you can just slide your finger on the video to change the volume instead of having to use the volume rocker. YouTube already gets money from me from taking 30% from all my superchat / membership payments.
So you have sponsorblocking and the dislike addon in your Premium version? No. Thats the problem, vanced was even better than Premium YouTube. I have no problems with paying 10$, but it will still be worse than Vanced :(
I've always used Vanced despite having YouTube Premium because the official YouTube app doesn't enable most of the Premium features for me without using a VPN.
I've got another solution, it's kiwi browser (or Firefox, if they've graciously allowed us to install extensions we want on our machines) + redirector (add on) + invidious.
> Firefox, if they've graciously allowed us to install extensions we want on our machines
The F-Droid guys have forked Firefox for Android to let you use any extension you want. They named it Fennec as the older Firefox, but is just the name, the codebase is the new Fenix one.
It's not forked by f-droid, it is maintained by Mozilla to not contain any proprietary blobs in accordance with the official f-droid repo policy, and last time I used it it only allowed curated extensions as of the fenix update. I'll try it out again.
421 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] thread[1]: https://newpipe.net/
[2]: https://nitter.net/YTVanced/status/1503055442506915846#m
I’m sick of typing the same search query again and again.
I can't add links because new account.
Easily installable through F-Droid by adding this repo: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...
Despite my issues with needing to log in, seeing Vanced go is horrible. It is an insanely well put together app.
The user experience is unfamiliar and seems significantly worse than Vanced.
Vanced is what the official youbutt app should've been. RIP.
That didn't used to be a "g" there, would be my guess.
(A comment that "glows" would usually be something like: hey fellow members of radical political ideology, who is up for letting those politicians know what lead tastes like? Let's conspire to commit domestic terrorism!" )
Slight nitpick here - NewPipe doesn't use any API's directly, just scrapes the webpage.
- Random other stuff keeps breaking, not that the 100+ lines of recursive Java gibberish in the crash popups tell you what broke (but the crash reporter itself does break regularly, too)
- App structure is counterintuitive: You have tabs on the main screen, and the side bar... duplicates the tab buttons, but turns the tabs into overlays that disable search and other functions? What?
- Content discovery is a mess: I cannot search specific channels. I cannot sort results. I cannot access channel playlists. It's always faster to open a browser and use the youtube website for this, even on mobile.
- Content organization is a mess: I cannot sort anything, period. Nor can I filter (e.g. to filter out videos already watched, or filter for videos started but not finished, ...), or bookmark specific videos, or do anything else with the content.
- Speaking of already watched videos, tracking progress isn't reliable.
- A few updates ago, video playback was turned into a multi-stage procedure, and now I need 3+ clicks to exit a video that already finished playing. What?
- Video overlay UX is horrible. I don't even know what details to go into, nothing about it is intuitive and I ended up crashing Newpipe a few times just trying to exit it (or go back to regular view), and I gave up on ever trying to use it.
And so on and so forth. That's just off the top of my head.
NewPipe works if you're subscribed to a small amount of channels that update rarely, and you go watch each video when it comes out, so you don't lose track of what's where and what you watched, and don't mind the occasional youtube-free week. For anything else it breaks down quickly, and hard.
If you're, like me, subscribed to a dozen channels that have backlogs in the hundreds of videos to go through, it's a nightmare. I force myself to use it to minimize my exposure to YT's website/client, but I am not enjoying the experience and cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone else.
Hard disagree. NewPipe is the only way I use youtube on mobile.
> It barely works, if at all. Casting definitely never ever worked for me, not even once.
Because casting requires usage of Google API's and NewPipe is privacy oriented.
It's not broken, it's as intended.
> The user experience is unfamiliar and seems significantly worse than Vanced.
I prefer it to default youtube . It's no nonsense, and gets the job done.
Haven't used vanced, so can't judge there.
Sorry, but until such things are rectified, New Pipe is a hell no for me; -10/10, worse than vanced, cannot recommend sharp-edged user-unfriendly software. Even when it's OSS and privacy friendly.
For a similar case, see gnuPGP. We all know how that one ended up not saving the world :(
That being said, I can't find the cast button you're talking about.
I also can't find the sharp edges you mention[0] could you give other examples? In my experience I've just had it do what it says on the box with no fuss.
[0] though I'll admit my tastes are minimalistic and I avoid cloud tools as much as possible - either or both of those may color my views.
For example, I see not having access to Youtube account information as a positive.
My specific (brief) experiences include: Instead of playing the video..
- Wait forever while it spins.
- Crashes randomly. Repeatedly.
- No way to reference previously watched or liked videos.
- Atrocious, non-functional search.
Have all these bugs have been fixed in the past 6 months?
There's a history tab, I don't really use ot but looking over it now it looks decent, and can sort by most and last played.
The only issue I've had with search is that it doesn't return playlists, but my typical flow is to go to the profile page and follow a link from there so it hasn't bothered me.
Perhaps a hardware issue, or NewPipe handles spotty connections poorly or something.
Do you happen to have a link to a GitHub issue or some other background? I'd like to learn more about this, I was under the impression cast-type devices (including Chromecast) usually implement DLNA which should be interface-able without any proprietary APIs. This is just from vague readings and recollections though.
Found it! The discussion was regarding Chromecast specifically,so I don't know about other cast setups.
Also is from Nov 2021, so possibly out of date at this point?
I've linked to the concluding comment here, I found the whole chain worth reading however:
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/668#issuecomme...
Is the biggest challenge really in providing an AppID? I must be missing something because that doesn't seem like a big privacy concern or technical hurdle, which brings us back to no traceable logical problem other than "it's hard to do and I don't get paid for this" (which would be a fair position for an OSS maintainer to take).
Maybe the should look at how VLC streams to Chromecasts, because at least in the case of VLC, it's FOSS and sort of works.
The PFY is a reference to a character (the "Pimply Faced Youth") from The Bastard Operator from Hell [0]! I'm just starting out my career, so it felt appropriate.
My understanding is that they mostly didn't want to do anything more involved with Google than scrape a webpage and write an Android app - though I'm not on the team and haven't participated and couldn't say for sure.
I think they have looked at VLC - there's a lengthy workaround lower in the thread via VLC, but I've not read that part in depth.
Actually, just double checked. Looks like theres a mention here: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/668#issuecomme... of that being a possibility, but no ones commented on it or made any progress yet afaict.
[0] Originals here: http://bofharchive.com/BOFH.html, and I think The Register has new ones.
Maybe now that Vanced is toast, someone will step up and lay the pipe into newPipe to get it working properly? Is this just wishful thinking? We need a hero..
How did you cast it? It worked perfectly when I casted it with Kodi.
Without the great music recommendation system I might as well just listen to my Jellyfin song collection. What value does YouTube even have without recommendations?
[1] some of these clients have their own sign in, but you are not signing into your actual YouTube account and you don't get recommendations from YouTube.
https://github.com/Elijas/auto-youtube-subscription-playlist...
Music I just use the default App and pay for the subscription.
Lack of sign in in NewPipe was a positive change for me.
It pushes trash to my feed.
You can watch videos on it that were recommended elsewhere. Like, say, here. Or reddit. That's my exclusive usage of it.
These days they just encourage you to add their repo to F-Droid. I set it up once and it just works now. I get updates as soon as they're available.
F-Droid adds lag to the build+publish process; cutting out the slow middleman is sensible if you want fast fixes.
So if there's anything resembling source, it's more of a diff of a certain YouTube app version you can't just cleanly upload somewhere or even apply to new versions.
The problem, of course, is that bogus DMCA claims are enough to take down a repository, and protesting those DMCA claims will dox you to the big tech companies.
Every time a project like this goes down, I feel more like there should be some kind of Gitea server hosted on a hidden service where "illegal" projects like these can be developed.
While not a Gitea server per se (GitLab instead), git.rip used to be a well-known host for pirated content, leaked source code, and various other things. If I remember correctly, the amount of content on there was in the hundreds of terabytes, which would have made it very hard to externally archive (not even taking into account bandwidth restrictions).
It was much much more of a threat to Google than newpipe or less "normie" friendly alt clients, and it was getting too popular for it's own good. I'm wondering if the current Vance releases will keep working for a while, or if Google will try to target those too by breaking something in their backend.
(The YouTube Premium download feature is bad anyway because videos downloaded that way are artificially DRM-protected when the original streams are DRM-free can be downloaded using something like yt-dlp.)
"Removing the revenue stream for the original app author through modification or bypass."
Just because you're paying through advertising rather than cash doesn't make it any less of a crack or any less piracy.
And to alter it, sure.
Having come to adulthood in the 90s, we absolutely did not all agree that.
More than I am of those who don't.
PS.: I imply that the "beep" is the source of revenue of course, which is a bit hidden in your analogon.
Yes, the rules for digital should be changed to be more alike the physical world, especially regarding ownership, resales, lending/borrowing and modification.
If you remove the source of revenue for a given product without consent of the manufacturer/developer of that product and do this in a professional fashion, you are inflicting severe damage to that manufacturer/developer of a product.
The reason why digital problems are not easily transferred to the real world or back is in this example, that it costs the author of that mod zero time to do it for all people at once (developing time is fixed) and is accessible nearly instantly from everywhere. This is certainly not true for the microwave example.
edit: replace owner with manufacturer/developer (of that product)
Clearly it's not: https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/250050-supreme-court...
Eventually, the form become generalized across all nouns, with -es being applied to any noun to indicate possession. In most cases, the e is silent, and typographers began to either omit it (e.g. "whos") or, eventually, replaced it with an apostrophe, as the French did. And I suppose "whose" gained an e to indicate the "long vowel".
So we've ended up in a situation where we've basically lost noun declension and just attach suffixes to indicate plurality and possession (s and 's), but our pronouns have inherited their old declensions, without the -es/-'s suffix attached.
Granted, "its" is itself a semi-recent invention, as OE and middle english used "his" for both masculine and neuter third person singular genitive pronouns.
Even trying to query Google for the correct rules for it's/its doesn't turn up clear, concise information as you've achieved here in two sentences. Tragically, it's another case of SEO'd to death.
Just remember this[0] and you should be set:
-- Oxford University Press, "Edpress News"[0] http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/3944...
Use a dictionary or simply "define:"
He --> his
She --> her
They --> their
We --> our
I --> my
You --> your
It --> its
(Since someone will probably point this out, this is only true of the common pronouns. There are unusual pronouns that have apostrophes in their plurals. Eg: one --> one's. But nevertheless, the rule worked for me.)
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe
Oh wow. So, is this a common thing? When I type without thinking about it too much, and with my typing not being able to keep up with my brain, I tend to make those errors a lot. But I thought it was just me being dumb and not some general thing that happens to people.
I also sometimes put in an entirely incorrect word that is vaguely like the one I intended, with amalgamated hints of a neighbouring word, usually the one after. My brain just melds them together. Sometimes I read what I write and wonder how on Earth I can be such an idiot. Blessed are those times I catch such fuckwittery before posting.
- ed
the its/it's one is really annoying though, because of course I KNOW which is correct, but sometimes my finger just slips and sneaks in that apostrophe.
And yeah, I sometimes created melded words as well. I wonder if there’s a name for our issue.
And of that small set of people, the number who already live in Russia is even lower...
I'm curious, where exactly are the Cease and Desist letters delivered, when they get sent? To whatever contact email appears in the project's website, if any?
An American Court even found Sci-Hub guilty, in a lawsuit brought up by Elsevier. But nobody could enforce it, so it was just pointless in the end.
>do they ever break compatibility?
Yes, but I can't seem to easily find data on how often they do. I assume the "Currently installed versions will work just fine, until they become outdated in 2 years or so." is referring to how long they expect Google to keep compatibility with the latest version they used.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bensin/2017/01/04/does-the-orig...
I believe that's because unlike other alternative clients it is a modified version of the official app.
What even...did Google force them to Tweet this or is it a joke?
Also the vanced devs got to use the decompiled Google app. Not like they started from scratch and made a better app.
they are the "best" at satisfying the corporate demands of google, rather than consumer's demand.
Vanced is very much focused on improving the user experience. Sad to see it go - i hope they leave behind a way for others to do this very same mod in a way that google cannot cease and desist.
Vanced made mobile YouTube tolerable. I have NewPipe but it's not the same. Hopefully as the tweet says, it will stay functional for a while longer.
At times, it's worth thinking about what you're using adblock to accomplish at a higher level. For me it was subjecting myself to YouTube's recommendations for several more hours per day.
Luckily I had found an opportunity to quit YouTube stemming from unrelated reasons, and in the process I uninstalled Vanced. On desktop I block the recommendations feed in case I come from an external link, and I would say it has saved me significant amounts of time.
Also, this shutdown serves as a reminder of the future we may start to find ourselves living in when ads served from first-parties and technologies like DoH become ubiquitous. It's going to be far harder than using uBlock Origin to block ads when you start to need something beyond the DNS layer outside of the browser ecosystem.
I listen to/read this somewhat frequently as a reminder to keep in mind what I ise the internet for.
Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30444648 - Feb 2022 (346 comments)
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20647
To anyone out of the loop, Firefox Android has basically killed add-ons, similar to Chrome. This is why you have to go through 12 steps just to install a fucking addon.
I don't see how Firefox for Android is similar to Chrome, as Chrome doesn't have add-ons at all.
https://mirror.codebucket.de/vanced/
Rule #1 is: Don't alienate your power users.
They are in the exploitation phase of civ. What phase comes next? Pretty sure it's the final phase..
And having plenty of resources doesn't mean it's wise to squander them, or give them away for free.
With all of that said, Youtube operated at a loss for a long time, which is impossible for anyone but a government or a charity to sustain indefinitely. According to this article, Youtube was not profitable in 2015, nine years after Google bought it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...
I don't think "greed" makes sense as an insult directed at a for-profit corporation. It is by nature a machine to maximize shareholder value; it is nearly as amoral as its recommendation algorithm that tries to maximize watch time. Of course, letting machines run amok is dangerous and antitrust laws used to keep them in check, but not so much anymore.
Today, there are pre-rolls, post-rolls, unskippables, multiple ads in a single ad segment, mid-rolls, etc. That's significantly more than the ads from years ago. Also, ads often supports copyright claimants instead of the actual content creators.
- configure each client device accordingly (very inconvenient, but mentioning it for completeness)
- configure your router's DHCP service to tell clients that the DNS server is [IP address of pihole] instead of [IP address of router]
- configure your router's upstream DNS to be [IP address of pihole] instead of [what your modem offers] and leave the DHCP service alone (clients use the router as the DNS server)
I suspect you're using the third way, based on the issue you're having. Try the second way instead, so the router isn't even processing client lookups. (Maybe not all routers offer this. I use pfsense which does.)
Anyway, my pihole doesn't block YouTube ads... Can I remedy that?
[0] https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/dns-redir...
I've not found a solution for YouTube app on Android TV other than using Vanced! Not sure if Adguard for Android helps either.
The ads are so bad and so frequent in the YouTube app that I hardly ever use it.
Force people to give up phone number if they want to use gmail over IMAP
I have it on good authority that Shorts is both experiencing steady growth and is the fastest-growing segment within Youtube-the-company.
I already pay for two other music services and have no interest another one so the $20/mo is too steep for my blood (for the family plan).
YT apparently trialed a YT Premium Lite in Europe [0], which is at a price-point I'd be willing to pay (7 EUR). That's on par with what I'd pay for other streaming services, and that's probably 50% of my streaming source, especially with the amount of learning content on there. I'd probably be willing to pay up to $10 USD/mo for just ad-free YT.
But the other ~$10USD/mo for an unwanted service doesn't appeal to me.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/2/22605455/youtube-premium-l...
The only way that makes sense for all of us as a democratic society is to keep control, and this can only be achieved through Libre Software. The real move right now is not to keep existing Vanced content on life support, but to use Newpipe. If it doesn't support the right features, fork it. Enhance it. Use it as the Common it is
I wouldn't want to be the one with my neck on the line in court over this.
Consider that .torrent files also don't have the content, yet torrent sites which serve them and provide tracking for torrent clients are having to play cat and mouse with copyright holders.
That said, so much of what we knew about copyright and software in the 90s has been overturned by subsequent rulings or even statutes (like the DMCA) that if you wish to avoid being burned by copyright suits, you must retain an attorney knowledgeable in this area of law. (Which is true in any case.) As an example, look-and-feel copyrights are back on the table thanks to The Tetris Company LLC.
These instructions do not increase the number of people who have copies of the work, and so no copying is taking place; copyright should not be applicable here. The licensor may argue that license clauses is being violated, but not copyright; i.e. the users are using the software in ways that they don't like (use is not copying or redistribution).
(Assume for this question that the Mona Lisa was currently protected by U.S. copyright.)
To the extent that it's "based on" copyrightable expression in the Mona Lisa, yes. AIUI the key question is: would a viewer recognise the Mona Lisa from your transparency? And that would be a question of fact for the jury; personally guessing I'd say probably not from just the position of a mustache in a frame, probably yes if you included e.g. an outline of the pose. (In which case it might still be protected fair use, but it would be a derivative work, and you'd have to make that positive defence).
Food is required for a healthy society but would anyone here advocate for farmers to give away all of their produce for free?
Text-tiles are necessary for society but would you advocate that clothing be provided by the creators free of charge?
The only thing different about software is that little to no physical resources are required as a prerequisite to its production, but an individuals time and energy is.
A world in which no one was paid to write software would be a world with much worse offerings than what we currently have and would be a net loss for humanity.
But, but, ... Vanced is free-as-in-beer software that prevents Google getting ad revenue for their product/service.
There are plenty of successful software companies whose offerings are not proprietary, yet manage to pay their developers well. Example products:
- MongoDB
- Red Hat
- Docker
- Elastic Search
- Vagrant
Seeing them succeed up to that point is already an incredible feat, and perhaps they will find a way to turn around with a bright future ahead, but at this point I wouldn't give them as clear examples of success of the business model.
Red Hat is IBM, so I'm not sure it fits in the list.
Their software was ripped and resold by a billion dollar corps and they could do nothing about it.
https://opensource.org/node/1099
Yet, they still are able to employ people and give them a fair wage, making them good examples.
Libre Software can totally be funded, through individual donations or through public funding; in fact, because Libre Software is a common, it is only normal that time spent improving them should be time paid by the entire society. I see no problem with the idea of taking from private property to further common property.
Given that HN is a higher quality social media platform than most, maybe today that can change. Would you mind answering a few questions:
1. Who does the hard/dirty jobs in this society? Farming being one. But also construction, sewage, trash, ad inifitum. There are a lot of undesirable jobs and while maybe some people would be willing, I doubt our needs could be met when the same individuals could just work an easier job for the same reward.
2. How are "needs" defined? Food, shelter, clothing. Then what? Electricity? Internet? Smartphones? Gaming consoles/PC's? Games to play on those? Music? Memory foam mattresses? Etc. If all of these aren't needs, then how would individuals with varying interests actually choose what they want to own?
3. What are the incentives to advance amd become highly skilled? Take doctors. Some are really passionate about what they do. Most may be a little passionate, but are mainly just intelligent people drawn by the money and prestige. Assuming medical school and university still exists, for what purpose would someone go through that pipeline when they could do something far easier?
The suggestions that we as a society should basically just bully a certain number of people into undesirable positions is egregious and almost worse than blatant authoritarianism. At least today the people working those jobs are usually compensated better than they would be in another obtainable position given their skills amd ability.
I just feel like all this crying foul about authoritarianism is because people view certain roles, even the essential ones, as beneath them. If that mindset needs to be changed then I'm all for it. I don't deny that it will be hard, and I don't deny that I might be guilty of this myself.
Vanced is literally a cracked version of Google's software though, to remove all the revenue checks.
If Vanced will keep working as-is for maybe a year or two, that's at least nice, I just would like to keep a copy of the latest version for reinstalling when my tablet is formatted in the next days...
How badly Mozilla messed up with Firefox on Android is worth another topic, however.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/it/android/addon/video-background...
Background playback is a paid feature. You may disagree with that decision but the option is there if you wanted it.
These are all solved by Vanced. Paying for Youtube premium does not solve any of these.
No background play
Mainly
I can modify my behaviour instead. Watch using computers with Adblock and de program myself to want to listen to music from YouTube.
Boom done, no need for a YouTube subscription. Subscription hell has got to end.
All of those above are possible via the website - it remembers your video's quality and speed preferences.
There are too many youtube stories shoved right in your face with the app - no way to disable it.
There is no way to disable the 'cast' button from the player - it's not very useful but you can easily fat finger it.
That's just the surface - i haven't even gotten to the ads, and the forced community posts etc.
Just replace the domain with "nitter.net" any time someone sends you a link to a tweet, and you're good to go.
I shouldn't have to pay a monthly recurring charge to get some company to undo their kneecapping of how my hardware and software (that I own, outright, code and all according to GPL) works just because their business model isn't compatible with me being in control of what's mine.
It's no small thing, just brushing off $10 a month is hubris. For half the worlds population that's a third of their income. And for some of us other people, I don't want my money going to google, period. I don't care if it is 10 cents a month, I'm not paying a company to solve a problem they created on purpose in order to charge for the solution.
https://sponsor.ajay.app/
I held out on blocking ads for some time, until it became impractical to avoid drive-by attacks other ways and the amount of stalking involved got _really_ creepy.
If sponsor segments irritate me enough that I'd consider sponsorblock then I choose between paying for the content directly (if a sponsor-free version is available that way) or just not consuming it (at least not from that source).
I’m guessing that sponsors probably look at click through or view count. I believe sponsors that care about views will ask to see this chart in the future if they don’t ask for it now.
Long term if no one buys the sponsorships will fall off.
> I'll never buy
Of course if you know with absolutely 100% certainty that you'll never buy or mention to others (you might not need/want a WidgitotronAsAService, but maybe someone you know asks about them later) anything ever mentioned in a sponsor spot, then no there is no loss (and I envy your clairvoyance).
I consider it a politeness to the content creators to not automatically skip the sponsor slots. I do manually ship the ones I've heard a few times already, but you never know if the next one might have some relevance. Unlike stalky ads, the sponsor slots have some chance of being relevant to what I'm thinking about while watching that particular clip.
They get paid just for talking about the products, what's the difference if I skip the segment manually, or if a plugin does it automatically?
For me as a european, quite a lot of physical items which are being sponsored are not available in my country, so the ads for these are essentially useless.
The rest of the ads are VPNs(which I already got), various SaaS which I have absolutely no use for or things I already know (and don't want).
Online ads are already annoying and useless to me, but sponsored segments are even worse.
At least I don't feel bad for skipping these segments because AFAIK, creators just have to integrate these segments into the videos, that's it. The advertisers can't know if I've seen the segment so the creator gets paid the same, doesn't matter if I watch or skip it.
However, I do not believe that blocking ads is taking money from providers. I think if your business model involves displaying ads, you must factor in the cases where consumers are not interested in said ads. Otherwise where do we draw the line? What if the consumer is letting the ad shows but not watching it? Will we mandate eye tracking? What if the consumer is mentally tuned out? Will we mandate brain implants? What if the consumer takes a principled stance of never purchasing anything they see in an ad? Will we mandate consumers mandatorily convert a certain percentage of ads that are shown to them? It's gonna delve into absurdity and a consequential threat to human well being. I wish society could just reach a common ground that it's a fundamental right that people are allowed to block ads by whatever means they see fit.
On just that, yes.
But at least sponsor spots are just that, payment for advertising. They are not directly part of the global stalking networks. I don't object to advertising as a way of paying for things, I object to being followed around in everything I do.
Further, if I manually skip the ads, how is that functionally different to automatically skipping the ads? What if I turn off audio or avert my eyes? Are you arguing that I should have my eyes and ears glued to the screen when the ads are playing?
I don't think I can happily pay $0.50 every day just to be able to keep listening to the news after I push the lock button on my phone.
I'd be happy to support youtube if they actually supported their community and content creators, but right now, my opinion on youtube itself is that it's hostile to anyone who needs to use it.
YouTube Premium does support creators, 55% of your subscription gets split among the creators you watch. The more you watch a specific creator, the more they get from your subscription. I've seen some creators say they get more from Premium users than from ad-watching users.
For reference, Bandcamp pays creators 85% to 90% of the revenue they generate.
Examples of youtube's hostility include removing dislikes to please ad companies under the guise of user safety, terrible account recovery processes and allowing copyright bots to shutdown channels by spamming claims because youtube has placed the onus of proof on copyright creators, and not the ones actually making the claims.
[0] https://youtu.be/-zt57TWkTF4?t=408 (Timestamp 6:50)
It's not about the money- it's about respecting the user. The app is so full of garbage I won't pay for it. The day they shut down NewPipe is the day I just stop using YouTube on my phone and tv.
Can you elaborate?
I instantly feel like I'm capital to be maximized rather than a respected user when I open YouTube.
Edit: While typing this they felt the need to use a push notification for some breaking news video. Add it to the pile of bullshit.
Comments under video are just a thin 50px tall bar, just don't click on it? Just like you don't have to scroll down on the web. Just fullscreen and watch your video.
> I don't care about uploading shorts
Then don't press the shorts button?
> I'm tired of constant redesigns or moving things around
I don't think youtube gets that much redesign. On android, the biggest recent changes are dark mode (optional), making comment section smaller actually, and the chip filtering system.
> I just want to see videos related to what I search for
Then use the search button, it does just that
> or channels I'm subscribed to.
There's a tab dedicated to subscriptions, and it only shows chronological order of videos from your subscriptions, nothing else. You can also filter by a specific channel, or by tags such as (today, unwatched, etc).
> a push notification for some breaking news video
All notifications can easy be blocked, either at the app or OS level. Takes 3 clicks.
Until last month, kids could not use YTM. With the family plan, this was basically a DOS for years (or setup new kids accounts and lie about their age).
IMO, GPM's recommendations were much better.
We kept the family plan because of YTP and my wife and I still had access to music.
Wasn't that just moved to Google Podcasts? (Although, something like PocketCasts IMO is a better service.)
The lack of kids support is very true. The free tier also was quite trash for a long time, and the lack of desktop casting. Most of these have been since fixed though and at this point I would say YTM has feature parity.
Recommendation is always hard to discuss as it's very subjective. That being said, YTM has great playlists. It automatically clusters your music into 7 playlists which is describes with 4-5 artist names. There's discovery, replay and new release mixes which are great too.
Overall, I agree GPM got shut down way too soon, but at this point YTM has made a lot of progress vs what it was 2 years ago.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + Video Background Play Fix
uBlock Origin -> removes the ads (but no sponsorblock) Video Background Play Fix -> lets you turn off the screen or switch tabs with it still playing
The F-Droid guys have forked Firefox for Android to let you use any extension you want. They named it Fennec as the older Firefox, but is just the name, the codebase is the new Fenix one.
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
Doing none of that and just pay for YouTube premium.
Why?
Because sponsorblock is fantastic and I can set my default video speed to 2x.
That's it. That's all I wanted. But I was more than happy to install and maintain the app to do so.