Freetube is really good. It’s in the AUR.
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I found a very easy solution quite by accident in Firefox; I cant speak for any other browser:
I usually just add videos to the que from within my home page so I didn’t have to keep clicking on one every time another was done as I’m usually working in my shop and have my hands full with tools, wood, n’stuff, also because if I clicked on one I would lose the home page, and when opening a new one some video I wanted to watch was no longer there. That’s what I was doing when the warnings from the authoritarian YouTube regime started. I have only had them for a few days until I saw two videos in the side feed and to watch one but not lose the other, I right clicked and selected “Open link in new personal tab”: The video opened with no warning, and so did the other! It was late and I went to bed.
The next morning I found an email with a live show I wanted to watch and set to notify me but when I clicked the link the page opened to a partial interface with only outlines where the widgets should be; no color anything and nothing loaded beyond that. The same happened when I wanted to reply to a comment from a notification email. I then tried my YouTube home page, and did the right click thing and same outcome. I restarted Firefox, still the same, but this time I noticed something: At the top of the right click menu was “Open link in new tab” not “Open link in new personal tab”! well turns out you get a different menu on your home page than within the feed of a n open video page, so I chose the second option “Open link in new container tab”, and clicked on “Personal” in the list of tab types" and it opened and plays fine.
I also found out that it may just have been a glitch in Firefox, because it works from my feed again with just “Open link in new tab” 
Very strange indeed, needless to say I have not seen a warning since, just by opening videos in new tabs!
Maybe I will try adding videos to the que again and see if it’s gone: Who knows Firefox may have found an update for UBlock Origin or Privacy Badger (I use both) and they found and added a workaround, the feds may have told YouTube they can’t do that… Any which way I will stay on the case though
because it’s interestingly strange indeed.
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I disabled the ad blocker on YouTube and do not watch videos on YouTube itself anymore. Not sure if they would ban my account if I keep using an ad blocker. Instead, I use Individous. That’s a non central platform with many servers and different domains, hosting the exact same videos from YouTube itself (Edit: I actually don’t really understand how this works and if the videos are hosted there, or if it is just embedding the videos) with the same id. With a redirect addon for Firefox, it will redirect the video I open in a new tab on a domain like yewtu.be using Individous instead. The biggest drawback to me is that the videos are limited to 1080p or or some or most servers limited to 720p; me watching on a 1440p monitor.
Middle mouse click should open a new tab by default I think. I changed the Firefox setting to focus the new tab, so the extra click is not needed anymore.
Here the configuration you can import, but writing the rules is not complicated: https://pastebin.com/fSRQGpqH
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No problems here.
Chromium/ungoogled-chromium (have not tried Thorium yet) working flawless with Adguard, uBlock-Origin, Privacy Badger. The initial cookie-accept window vanishes after 1-2 seconds.
For a big pack of videos (i.e. playlist) I use play-with-mpv-git .
- $ chromium --version
Chromium 119.0.6045.59 Arch Linux
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It’s regional, they enable it on country-by-country basis.
Just a matter of time till worldwide, i’m sure. 
The first post from @pycrk was from germany (austria), so am I. So I tried a connection via vpn, set to Oregon/US. Doesn’t make no difference, working fine.
Interesting…There should be some other factor then.
Are you logged in / out?
The browser is set to delete cookies when closing. That’s why the “accept cookies window” always come up (but disappears by itself). I am only logging in any account if I really have to, that’s not the case here.
I mean, we use chromium for not having chrome’s not so open source sauce.
I haven’t turned off my ad-blocks and have been banned. I decided that I watch too much YouTube and didn’t watch it for a bout a week. At that time my account was “opened” again. Then closed for another week. Opened up again… then closed on me again. Seems to allow me to watch for a day or two every week or so.
I personally am not going to pay for YouTube premium, I think that is a bad investment.
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That sounds a bit complicated. YouTube now works again without me doing anything. wonders for how long.
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Linux Desktop: FreeTube App.
Any browser with the plugin LibRedirect, which automatically redirects from clicking any Youtube URL to individual Piped API website or FreeTube. It supports importing/exporting your favorite abos as JSON file from your local. No need login. -
Android smartphone: NewPipe(without Piped API) or LibreTube (using Piped API)
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Android TV and projector: SmartTube app
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I also had LibreTube for a while. Until it suddenly crashed again and again when playing any video. After that I turned to SmartTube.
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I watch a lot of sports: hockey, baseball. Librewolf through Mullvad works for me. If I put Librewolf’s Network Settings through SOCKS5 proxy manually using a 2nd Mullvad server (located close or closer to me) then of course things slow down a bit, but success happens … (mostly) zero ads.
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That would be, to put it mildly, foolish.
yt-dlp and a video player of your choice is all you need to watch YouTube videos anonymously and without ads.
This is how I do it:
I just copy the URL of the video I want to watch into the clipboard, and press Meta + V, which runs the script above in an opened terminal window, or opens a new one if it can’t find one with only shell running, and in a minute or two (which is probably faster than enduring an ad, but I wouldn’t know, never seen an ad on YouTube in my life 
), the video is downloaded and opened in the video player of my choice, offering me a much better experience, no ads, no buffering, super fast navigation, audio and video equilisers, all the bells and whistles my video player supports (I use MPV and SMPlayer). I can save it and watch it again without redownloading it and they can’t remove it from my hard drive if they decide to ban the user who made it.
They must be idiots if they think I would ever use their crappy embedded video advertisement player at youtube[dot]commercial website! I wouldn’t do it even if they payed me, let alone me paying them for it.
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I had also some issues with the version of Libretube currently available in F-Droid.
The latest from https://github.com/libre-tube/LibreTube/releases seems to be working fine on my end for now.
Edit: never mind, it seems that the one from F-Droid has also been updated.
SmartTube does not support any smartphone, but it is for Android TV / projector.
See the official ReadMe:
It works partially on my smartphone, for example: screen rotation does not work. It fits for TV screen well.
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yt-dlp is the nuke option I have in plan, if the in browser solutions with Indivious (or other) aren’t good enough anymore. Right now I use downloader to archive videos. Either streaming with mpv or downloading entirely with yt-dlp in a temporary folder is my backup plan if nothing else works anymore.
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Once you start downloading with yt-dlp to a temp directory, you’ll never use a browser to watch a video again. The experience is so much smoother and nicer when you have the entire file locally, instead of downloading it piece by piece while it plays. For example, you can instantly jump to any timestamp, without buffering.
And you can then harden your browser to get rid of almost all JavaScript, which will increase your overall security and privacy.
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I wonder, what about live streaming? It runs forever.
Some people want to read video comments and see “like” and “dislike” ratings.
Right. I know the benefits of it, because I download a lot of videos for archival reasons or other reasons. There are two reasons why I prefer in browser, because of the timestamps built into the scrollbar of the video and because of the extension “SponsorBlock for YouTube - Skip Sponsorship”. And I’m someone who comment on videos. And the extra step of waiting for the video to be downloaded and opening it in an external player is also a little annoyance too.