FreeTube: Is It Down For Me Or For Everyone?

General system Applications
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freetube-bin works

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pl
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not for moi at the present but I’ve had the whole “Works-For-Certain-Videos-Only” thing happen before so will keep trying. picture is freetube-bin

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try other Invidious instance.

what video doesn’t work? I will test

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It was the Plasmatics The Damned video where she drives the crazy bus. except it would not play

And Brandy by looking glass wouldn’t work either.

yes. I am odd.

I didn’t want to fight anymore after that

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The principle of Grayjay is:

Follow Creators,
Not Platforms

So in principle, it’s not about YouTube (or whatever platform), it’s about the content creator’s I choose to follow.

In practice, the majority of content creators still exclusively use YouTube, so the principle only gets you so far, but at the very least,Grayjay does bring in content from those other platforms for those content creators who do use them.

Grayjay provides a means to centrally manage subscription and watch content for I wide range of platforms, so yes, I like it.

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That happens when it discovers “unusual traffic”. In this case I was testing if you could route yt-dlp over a proxy.

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Freetube is great if you want to watch youtube without ads and even sponsor segments. Youtube is constantly pushing new security measures to prevent 3rd party apps like freetube to play their videos but freetube devs eventually find a way. I use “uBlock origin” on chromium so even the youtube website is ad-free for me.

I also have an ad-free youtube player on my android phone. So I can say that i haven’t seen a youtube ad for a long long time. Sometimes other people try to show me a video on their phones and the amount of ads that they have been “conformed into” is absolutely diabolical. Like how the hell do you even accept that? Unbelievable. I would just throw the phone to the wall.

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Love to see that UBO rule(s). That said I’d still prefer to proxy for many reasons than use the simple ad-block of YT.

Cynically maybe it makes no difference in the end, i.e. your privacy is not really mitigated with either option.

ads I can l can be patient with but excessive, gratuitous ads really piss me off. I listened to an 11-minute song today and they inserted it in the middle…work computer, out of my control.

PS–the number of people who are ‘conformed into’ excessive adds is equal to the amt that ask chatgpt what they should wear to lunch…

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Have you found any working instances of Invidious which still work in FreeTube?

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not with invidious,

have not tried the yt-dlp workaround tbh.

baby steps :slight_smile: –lotta work hours this week

I can dig playing music in the cli; cannot dig browsing/choosing versions in the cli though

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You mean something like this ?

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Freetube also allows you to set a third party app as the player. MPV for example. And MPV can be set to use yt-dlp automatically. That still works. You can install both with pacman, however, i suggest installing the “git” version of yt-dlp from the AUR repo because youtube constantly changes things and the pacman version is not updated frequent enough to catch up.

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Out of curiosity, what does an app like NewPipe (on Android) do differently? Very rarely have I had issues with it playing YT videos. I cannot even remember when the last was. Knocking on the wood, NewPipe is working just fine as of this writing and hopefully will keep doing so in the future.

I am far from knowledgeable about the under-hood-working of Android, but I am just curious if some of you know the difference.

As I see on page for the issue reported for FreeTube, there seems to be the same problem for FreeTube’s android app as well.

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I use this on my android phone:

It is actually a fork of newpipe. And yes, like newpipe, it has never failed to play a youtube video. Only the ones that require account log in (due to age limited videos).

Freetube is mainly a desktop app. It is not made for android originally (somebody ported it). And you are right, it constantly hits the wall of youtube changing something here and there and becomes unusable. They fix it but then it happens again. Freetube has been kind of in a software purgatory for a long time. They were talking about a huge overhaul of the code but they never did it. But I honestly don’t care about the playback function of freetube, i can always bounce the links to chromium or even MPV (via yt-dlp). The most functional part of freetube for me is its subscription feed that i can export and import anytime i want “without the need for any google account”.

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NewPipe has had it’s issues with YouTube as well, just perhaps not as recently. There have been numerous times where it was failing constantly and an update was needed, much like FreeTube is dealing with at the moment.

Eg:

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how long has this been now? 3 weeks? not being able to hear what you want to hear or see what you want to see for 3 weeks is like not having coffee for three weeks. Or (gasp!) beer.

When I checked in to see what condition my condition was in. Yeah yeah yeah. Not good.

I have not caved in to crawl to YT yet.

to @Bink : you present a plethora of passive workarounds ^^ above this post. I have resisted exploring all of them in this thread because I really did not think this BS would go on 3 weeks…ugh

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It has only been 10 days…

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So what does that mean for future usage of yt-dlp?

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It likely means that yt-dlp will have extra dependencies in the future. Luckily deno and nodejs are already in the repos.

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if it feels like three weeks it’s the same, right? asking for a friend :wink:

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