My last hour with Freetube

General system Applications
21

Freetube actually supports using a tor proxy. It is almost completely transparent. I was just about to try it out given the demise of invidious but then freetube stopped working. Hopefully it will be back soon.

22

I’ve been trialing Grayjay, to address this issue in two ways:

  • YouTube playback doesn’t seem to have the same issue FreeTube is currently experiencing.
  • It isn’t just for YouTube! It supports multiple simultaneous platforms, including Odysee and Rumble, so if the channels you watch exist on those other ones, you can at least in part, ditch YouTube.

Both Android and desktop apps are available, although so far I’ve only tested the desktop app. In my trial of the desktop app, I have encountered numerous bugs, and the app is still considered pre-release.

grayjay-bin AUR

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1 Like
23

I just tried it.

That has a few too many bugs for me to consider it usable. I may check it out again in the future.

24

Yeah there were quite a few. Even just entering search terms was doing weird things. I ended up needing to copy-paste in search terms from Kate to get around that bug :sweat_smile:

The other issue I’ve had, is searching channels was often not finding the Rumble counterparts, when they did exist. I suspect it was a Rumble API issue as there were occasional timeouts presented there.

I’ll be watching to see how promptly things are addressed.

25

You don’t need to download the video, if mpv and yt-dlp are installed you can watch the video simply with :

mpv ‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx’

My Youtube browser was ytfzf, but since it uses invidious it’s not really reliable now, I switched to my backup solution, Pipe-viewer, the console version has no thumbnails compared to ytfzf, but the GTK version has them.

26

Looks like the fix is being tested now:

2 Likes
27

At the time of that post I was unaware that freetube had support for an external player. clicking the icon and opening it up in mpv is easier and better in my opinion.

2 Likes
28

It’s a matter of time.
The fixed nightly build (portable version in screenshot) is ok for me.

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3 Likes
29

Re-installed 23.1 beta still has issues displaying videos. . . . wait and see . . . .that’s the rub.

Rich :wink:

1 Like
30

I’ve reverted back to using Firefox + uBlock Origin while FreeTube gets things worked out. Going with what works.

31

Is it that you don’t have any of these players?
Or do you just not want to use any of them for YT videos?

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32

If anyone doesn’t want to wait for the release, you can download a build from the development branch with the fixes. If you click on one of the recent builds from here, you can download the Appimage or the pacman package.

I tested the Appimage from this build. It is seems to be fixed.

3 Likes
33

You will need to have a GitHub account to download the nightly builds.

34

Oh, good point. I didn’t even realize that since I am almost always logged into github due to the projects I contribute to.

1 Like
35

Using ONLY capital (upper case) letters in all my searches proved to be working flawlessly for me. This may sound…weird enough too, but it worked. :innocent:
I started using & testing it after I found out about its existence here in the forum & so far I quite like it as one more alternative. With some good will & understanding (too early in development stage), I can say that, to me, is something one can use.

2 Likes
36

New Version is out

not available in aur as of yet.

4 Likes
37

Thanks for pointing to. Works excellent!

1 Like
38 
yay -Ss freetube
aur/freetube-electron-git 0.23.1.beta.r8113.cb06628-1 (+0 0.00)
    An open source desktop YouTube player built with privacy in mind - built from git source tree, with the system electron (unsupported).
aur/freetube-electron-bin 0.23.2-1 (+0 0.00)
    An open source desktop YouTube player built with privacy in mind, with the system electron (unsupported).
aur/freetube-nightly 0.21.2_nightly_4590-1 (+2 0.00) (Out-of-date: 2025-02-23)
    A private YouTube client (nightly build)
aur/freetube-git 0.23.1.beta.r8112.80cac00-1 (+21 0.07)
    An open source desktop YouTube player built with privacy in mind - built from git source tree.
aur/freetube-bin 0.23.1-1 (+191 6.48) (Out-of-date: 2025-02-23) (Installed)
    An open source desktop YouTube player built with privacy in mind.
aur/freetube 0.23.1-1 (+77 2.88) (Out-of-date: 2025-02-23)
    An open source desktop YouTube player built with privacy in mind.

I will wait for one of these to heal :slight_smile:

39

Yep. Downloaded the zip file. Works like normal again.

1 Like
40

Downloaded 23.2 beta about 30 minutes ago. . . woohoo. . . .it works once again. . . and I was really thinking I was missing podcast news and information. . . . . actually the break from it all was refreshing. . .

Rich :wink:

2 Likes