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DrNosferatu
m-p-3
There is also LibreTube that comes with SponsorBlock
rjzzleep
LibreTube has a feature that no other piped/invidious client has, which is to have one auth instance and one view instance.
Sometimes videos are not viewable on a specific instance, but this way you can keep all your subscriptions and other settings even when switching to a different instance.
mastazi
> that no other piped/invidious client has,
If I understand what you are saying, Piped has this. For example I can stream from instance-1.com but at the same time I'm logged into instance-2.com so that I can keep my favourites and settings. See "Instance" section here https://piped.video/preferences particularly the option "Use a different instance for authentication"
IMSAI8080
And FreeTube for desktop (just has regular adblock). It's an alternate client with a nice UI with a similar layout to YouTube.
mrln
FreeTube also has SponsorBlock built in, actually. I highly recommend it!
Also, I would not call it "adblock". It just comes without ads out of the box, just like most comparable apps.
microflash
LibreTube also allows you to directly stream from YouTube without any Invidious or Piped proxy which might be handy when these proxies are slow.
DrNosferatu
Is there a FireStick / TV friendly version of LibreTube?
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k8svet
Huh, quite a choice to not include screenshots.
wkat4242
Yeah this is the best version. I liked newpipe but their attitude to sponsorblock is tiring.
But I moved to libretube now. Newpipe kept throwing up errors when I jumped around a video.
bisby
I use sponsorblock on desktop, and sometimes I find the parts that they skip annoying. I don't fully agree with where and when they skip things. Watching Hot Ones today, they had a segment about how they have Hot Ones Hot Pockets now. and it skipped over it. But also, the hot pockets were a big part of the episode. For LTT videos, they skip the entire segue, instead of leaving the segue and then skipping the sponsor. The segues are a meme. They aren't sponsorship. Another channel I watch tests microphones and uses ad read to demo demo different mic quality. At that point skipping the ad read is skipping the actual content of the video. There's a few channels that mix the ad read into the context of what they are doing, and skipping those sections skips over important context for the rest of the video, and then i have to rewind into the sponsor part to see what is going on.
I actually agree with newpipe to some degree. There is very bad sponsorship, and there is light mentions of sponsorship or sponsorship adjacent content. not everything is black or white. Sponsorblock makes it all or nothing (they have different categories but I often disagree with what they put into the categories).
I wish I could turn it on per channel. because some channels I hate the 2 minute long brilliant ads, but on other channels Im fine with a 5 second "we're building this thing using X company parts because X company is sponsoring the video"
I still use it, but i find it just as frustrating as it is helpful sometimes.
DoktorDelta
Sponsorblock does allow you to whitelist specific channels. Should be in the settings somewhere, I've only ever done it via the ReVanced app but it should still be an option on desktop.
Rastonbury
I actually like it being aggressive, the fewer minutes of my life I spend on content of questionable value the better, I already watch too much youtube for my own good and never find rewinding back through a skipped section worth it
wkat4242
Sponsorblock depends on the users specifying which parts are which of course. It's not some kind of AI.
It's not perfect but I want to have the choice.
2Gkashmiri
You can configure sponsorblock with various options. End credits, sponsored sections, lots of things
shiroiuma
SponsorBlock has a lot of configurability: segments can be marked as various different things, so it's not all-or-nothing. You can set it to skip certain types of segments, and show other types. As for where things start and stop, it's crowdsourced, so you're relying on some volunteer to get those time points correct. I think it's possible to upload your own corrections, but I haven't played around with it much.
ryncewynd
What's the channel that does ad reads to demo microphone quality?
That's such a simple and genius idea
extraduder_ire
I assuming people submitting sections for LTT videos are trying to get it to match the floatplane version, which I assume doesn't have the segues.
I prefer using it without auto-skip though.
Tams80
While they are aggressive, it is optional and you are trying to avoid their revenue source. So there's reason to be so picky.
I just fast-forward or the the sponsorship segments out if they are too annoying.
ekianjo
> I liked newpipe but their attitude to sponsorblock is tiring.
What do they mean? They dont even want to provide it as an option?
WithinReason
Yes, also including the "restore downvotes" functionality
WD40forRust
Also check out BraveNewPipe, which is NewPipe x SponsorBlock with proper search options NewPipe also refuses to implement as nofix!
seqizz
Yeah this is an absolute gem. Sad that original NewPipe didn't include the functionality, even optionally.
micw
Honestly, I do not understand why one should use this. I have recently seen some high quality YT videos, each of a length of 30-60 minutes. In those videos where some sponsors mentioned which took only one or two minutes. Seems perfectly OK for me to support the creators. I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Nextgrid
If you watch YouTube enough you'll basically become aware of all the sponsors pretty quickly (and may even be a customer of some already!), so any exposure beyond that is a waste of time for all involved - if I didn't buy the product after seeing it 10 times, I won't buy it after seeing it the 11th either.
charcircuit
>if I didn't buy the product after seeing it 10 times, I won't buy it after seeing it the 11th either.
There is still value to the sponser in keeping a brand fresh in your mind
jlokier
I don't agree. I watch YouTube tech, math, and science content every day and that's not my experience.
There are a small set of products that seem to be everywhere for a while, occupying a minority of sponsor segments. But in most sponsor segments I see one-off products that I'll never see again on any channel.
On the rare occasions where they show something that looks really useful to me, I'd have to take a note because it's so unlikely to be a product I will encounter again.
I don't take those notes, so I've seen a lot of great-looking products that I'll never buy due to forgetting they exist by the time they would be useful to me. When I need something I tend to browse for what's available and/or look at reviews with a skeptical eye, as I'm sure many people do.
So the sponsor segments aren't that effective for me. But I wouldn't call them repetitive, except for a few products that come up a lot.
happytiger
Really? They will die? Are you suggesting that long form video didn’t exist before YouTube sponsors?
Innovation requires disruption, which requires competition, which YouTube has none of. If you want long form video content to survive in the medium to long term it needs to be possible to make a living in a diversity of ways and not be dependent on just one provider. So in that sense supporting the existing system only serves to reinforce the failure of long form content, as eventually a system without substantial competition will move to reduce cost and eventually focus only on the more profitable short form content (which is what’s happening).
The current war between YouTube and its users wouldn’t be possible if there were any viable alternatives at all.
I would think if you really cared about long form creators you’d support platforms that paid properly and didn’t keep 45% of their revenues. Even Apple only keeps 30% and they get deeply criticized, but whenever YouTube comes up people come out defend them. And all of this happens before subscription revenue, and it doesn’t include any of the other revenue Google takes off the top like landing page ads, sponsored promotion, etc.
Long form is in danger because of YouTube’s shift towards short form video. We should be pushing for competitors and not allowing them this insanely dominant position to an entire Internet content type.
darkwater
Are you saying that YT takes 45% of the money a YouTuber negotiates directly with a sponsor to talk about them for 1-2 minutes in a long-form video?
nfriedly
Despite the name, it actually blocks a lot more than just sponsors. It can be set to automatically skip intros, outros, recaps, like and subscribe reminders, non-music sections of music videos, and other "fluff".
It significantly boosts the signal to noise ratio, and makes YouTube a much better experience.
deadfece
That sounds very useful on the non-ad improvements, and oddly enough I might try it for these areas. The sponsor mentions don't really bother me and I just skip them if they're not relevant. Sometimes it's kind of neat to see one and think "Oh, this creator got sponsored by <big deal tech product>, that's cool, get paid!", or if they're sponsored by bs snake oil companies, then I may discount the creator's input a great deal on account of them not having any discernment.
It's a small data point about the content, so it can sometimes be helpful if I'm trying to decide who to pick amongst forty different 2hr lectures on the same thing.
Bishonen88
So what are we paying premium for if the creator pushes their own ads? Anyhow, when I was watching TV year's ago, I hardly ever stayed on a channel during the ads break. I won't sacrifice my time being sold on mostly rubbish which I wouldn't buy anyway (vpn, brilliant etc.)
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matheusmoreira
> I do not understand why one should use this.
Because we don't want to be advertised to. There is no need for any further justification.
> I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Let them die.
Funes-
>I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Then so be it. I miss when people uploaded videos for the sake of it, not to make money by way of exploiting the users' cognitive vulnerabilities. I remember the days when I could search for a video on how to replace my dirt bike's carburetor and it was less than two minutes, didn't include any ads, and was straight to the point, all first person POV; you wouldn't even see the guy's face. Nobody was trying to get rich off it. It was all about sharing it with other people.
dawidpotocki
On my laptop alone SponsorBlock has skipped 5225 segments, which equals to 1d 20h. That's a lot of time I would waste by watching all of these.
Also, if you are fine with sponsor spots, you probably would have to also be okay with watching ads, so no adblocking either then.
ekianjo
> In those videos where some sponsors mentioned which took only one or two minutes. Seems perfectly OK for me to support the creators.
There is no good reason to force ads on anyone. I dont care if the creator needs to make a living out of youtube. Thats their problem and they should use stuff like patreon instead.
jaquesy
I've been using this for years to download YouTube videos when I go on trips, it makes it super easy since you can just share the link directly from YouTube to NewPipe and it'll pop up a neat download UI to select quality and threads to use.
Really great app for that purpose, although I will say I just used ReVanced for general YouTube browsing on my phone.
chii
I believe the one thing i see lacking for newpipe is viewing livestreams. Revanced is the way to go for a good youtube experience, but i use newpipe for downloading and saving a video offline.
autoexec
I've watched livestreams in newpipe. A few hours after it ended I used new pipe again to download the whole thing to see the parts I missed (new pipe wouldn't let me rewind to the start of the livestream after I joined)
1una
v0.26.0 (the next release) should support viewing livestreams. See https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10471
pmontra
I can view live streams in NewPipe 0.25.2 and I think I airways did.
This is a live stream I just watched to check that it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYDqZQpim8
It's a water pool in the Namib desert, so safe for work
argiopetech
Confirmed, with seeking.
There were times in the past where this was not the case, but it was likely 0.24 or before.
sigmar
I've been using this on android for more than 6 years. Love being able to quickly download a local copy of video or music as I'm boarding a flight or train. Highly recommend getting it using fdroid instead of apk because there have been points when youtube made changes that break the app and you'll need to get the latest update
SigmundurM
I would recommend using Obtainium[1] over F-Droid.
Obtainum downloads APKs directly from the repository's releases page, for example the GitHub releases page.
Why not use F-Droid? "Due to their process of building apps, apps in the official F-Droid repository often fall behind on updates. F-Droid maintainers also reuse package IDs while signing apps with their own keys, which is not ideal as it gives the F-Droid team ultimate trust. Additionally, the requirements for an app to be included in the official F-Droid repo are less strict than other app stores like Google Play, meaning that F-Droid tends to host a lot more apps which are older, unmaintained, or otherwise no longer meet modern security standards."[2]
[1]: https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium#readme [2]: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/#f-droid
noirscape
Do keep in mind the prior part that explains why they reuse package IDs and use signing keys that way; F-Droid aims for reproducible builds[0]. They also to my knowledge do respect developers that want a different build ID/package title to be used compared to the "official" version. The F-Droid version of Island for example is called Insular specifically to avoid this issue.
PrivacyGuides' motivations here are really aimed for a specific type of user (and I'll note that it's slightly odd for them to place so much faith in a point of origin that's historically been the easiest to compromise: the upstream developer usually is the easiest target, particularly on otherwise dormant software); the tradeoff F-Droid does might be more worthwhile for most people in that they act more like a linux distro maintainer, so there's a second set of eyes to prevent any shenanigans from being afoot on the upstream.
You can as I understand it run their actual servers rather easily (provided you have the computer space to do so)[1], so solving that is pretty easy, should you feel inclined to do so.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
[1]: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata contains all the files used to generate their servers, should just be able to combine it with their guide on how to run a buildserver on https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Build_Server_Setup/
clort
Highly recommend the NewPipe upstream repository within F-Droid, they usually fix breakage right away whereas F-Droid repository version can be a few days behind.
fariss
This is exactly what I used it for last time; downloading videos before boarding a flight.
anoncow
I can't find a source which has all the financial figures for YouTube, but YouTube had a gross revenue of 29 bn USD in 2022. Alphabet had 55 bn USD in net income in 2022 of which how much was YouTube's share in the net income is unknown (or at least I couldn't find it).
Let's use some assumptions to get to a number.
1. Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.
2. We know that YouTube's share in the overall revenue of Alphabet was 10.5%. Let's assume that all of Alphabet's properties were proportionately profitable (highly incorrect assumption). If the properties were proportionately profitable, YouTube's would have bought in a net income of 5.75 bn.
3. In the past it has been reported that YouTube has been breakeven from a profitability perspective.
This means that YouTube's net profit is in the range of 0 to 5bn USD. This is at best a gross profit margin of 17% which is not good for an internet services company.
I strongly believe technology like NewPipe should exist and companies shouldn't push for more DRM. But end users should not misuse open technologies so much so that companies end up with no other option but E2E encryption for video.
namrog84
I wonder if a torrent style equivalent for bandwidth sharing for things like YouTube content creators could work. Like you get ads unless you seed enough and then no ads when you consume.
I think it'd only work as a near seamless ui experience and not actually using torrents or any extra setup or complications. Probably branded a bit differently.
davkan
The problem with p2p for video is that the storage and bandwidth requirements are enormous most platform consumers are using mobile devices with limited storage and bandwidth which would have difficulty contributing to the network.
Maybe some type of appliance one could run out of their home to buy in or something? But a lot of home users have terrible upload or no internet at all.
Peertube is great but could never keep up with the sheer volume of data uploaded to YouTube.
wolfskaempf
Exactly what you described exists and is called PeerTube.
hsbauauvhabzb
Bandwidth costs money, YouTube can probably do it cheaper than end users at scale. But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.
chii
> But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.
Arent these goals one and the same?
Profit maximization is required under a capitalist system. By optimizig bandwidth expenses, you are achieving profit maximization.
AnonHP
> Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.
That’s a very poor and totally off assumption to start with, and makes it seem like YouTube is extremely generous. I’d guess YouTube shares, at best, 20% of the ad revenue with the content creator.
drbacon
It's 55%. This is the first non-Google result from a Google search:
https://www.yrcharisma.com/the-youtube-revenue-split-who-kee...
crashmat
Yes but this is only for creators who are large enough. Smaller creators still get ads on their videos, but dont get paid for it
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Animats
Installable via F-Droid, always a good sign.
FrenchyJiby
Absolutely, though the default F-Droid repo is a little slow to update (in case of the twice-a-year "Youtube changed their UI, breaking the world" update), so Newpipe team recommends their own (third party) F-Droid repo[1], where the updates are fresh off the press.
[1]: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/
globalnode
f-droid website says "This app promotes or depends entirely on a non-free network service" -- whats that all about?
maxhille
Because YouTube itself is non-free as in proprietary software
globalnode
right, i knew that -- thanks max :D
bluGill
You should use peertube instead. Saddly there isn't much content there, but try to look there first and reward those who post there with your eyeballs.
Animats
Peertube is useful, but so little used that I have 3 of the top 20 videos on Hardlimit, and they're tech demos of a rather obscure program. The most popular has 2,500 views.
What might be useful is some way to use PeerTube distribution on any .mp4 file. Peertube is only a caching system, not a replicated hosting system like BitTorrent. You have to host one copy of the file somewhere. You should be able to put that master copy on any low-end web server, generate a Peertube URL for it, and let Peertube spool it out. Peertube works by mooching bandwidth off the people watching, so as viewership goes up, so do serving resources.
rekado
I disagree with f-droid on using the term "non-free" for network services, because it conflates the issue of software freedom with SaaS.
See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
> Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaSS will be solved by developing free software for servers. For the server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their developers/owners have power over the server. That's unfair to the server operator, and doesn't help the server's users at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect the server's users from the effects of SaaSS. These programs liberate the server operator, but not the server's users.
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b3nji
What do you guys think to GrayJay? Following the creators, not the platforms. I'm told sponser block is in the works too.
lrvick
When it is open source and available on Linux I am sold.
pricci
The source is open
lrvick
The source is public. Public source is not open source.
It is not open for me to port, repair, improve, or redistribute to signed and reproducible built distribution channels like f-droid, arch, or debain as I see fit. Honestly really disappointing from a team known for promoting right to repair. I was totally on board with sharing grayjay from the rooftops until I saw the LICENSE file and my heart sank.
Also at a minimum this creates a lack of accountability to prove given binaries came exactly from published code. Someone backdoors the grayjay CI/CD server and everyone gets a backdoored app. Centralized software distribution is irresponsible in a world where supply chain attacks are common.
If they just care about malicious impersonation they should have just done what Mozilla did and file trademarks but leave the code open.
bkm
Newpipe is great for background listening and PIP (window can be resized/moved). For downloading, Seal reigns supreme. You can 'share' a video to the app and it downloads the video right away.
noman-land
NewPipe is the best. Dunno how people watch YouTube without it. You can also subscribe to channels from it without a YouTube account.
endorphine
I'm watching fine on Firefox with uBlock Origin. I mean, I don't get ads. What else am I missing by not using NewPipe (I don't care about downloading videos).
fwn
The parent wrote
> You can also subscribe to channels from it without a YouTube account.
This means that losing your Google account does not mean losing your playlist.
Big tech accounts can be surprisingly fragile.
ceuk
FYI Google takeout lets you set regular, automatic exports of any of your Google data (e.g. you can have a backup of your YouTube subscriptions, playlists etc emailed to you every month).
noman-land
Subscribing to channels. Trim silences. Various pitch and speed options. Background play. Picture in picture. Watch history. Playlists. NewPipe also plays Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and has the entire media.ccc.de library and can do all those things with those services as well.
One of my most used F-Droid apps.
hju22_-3
Almost all of those you get from just using the normal website with uBlock Origin and a browser lol. Not really exclusive features.
endorphine
Thanks, convinced - I'll give it a try
winwang
It's extremely simple: I pay for Premium.
yard2010
How can you disable tiktok on youtube? I've been a paying customer for years and I would happily pay more to remove this cancer.
mejthemage
Big +1. I feel I can keep my kids YouTube usage under control and effectively moderate what they watch. With shorts I can't scroll through the 100 shorts they quickly swiped through, have no idea which ones they actually watched, and I frequently see a lot of inappropriate content in shorts that I don't normally see on their accounts.
Shorts actually makes me want to ban YT in my house altogether and cancel my premium sub
docmars
Do you mean their Shorts feature?
grudg3
Agree, but unfortunately I still can't use it to stream to my Chromecast so I need to go to the YouTube app when I want to play stuff on TV
m4rtink
SmartTube supports Chromecast/Android TV: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
actf
To be clear, it doesn't support casting, which is what the previous commenter was asking for.
It runs directly on android tv. The app even says that there is no support for phones or tablets so casting isn't going to work.
I also agree that casting is the major missing feature from all these apps. Mirroring might be a substitute for some but, again to be clear, it isn't the same as casting and in most cases the quality is going to suffer significantly.
Zambyte
Can't you just display your screen using chromecast? I use newpipe on my tv all the time by juat plugging my phone in via HDMI.
Unfrozen0688
Another reason why Android is the superior phone OS.
miki123211
iOS has Yattee[1].
It's technically a personal video-watching app, not a Youtube app, which you're supposed to link with your own personal video server, but the server APIs it is compatible with are the same APIs that are exposed by Invidious and Newpipe instances. This is not a coincidence.
I'm sure Apple is going to delist it from the App Store at some point (App Store guidelines are just that, guidelines, and there's no getting around them with a weird loophole like you can do with actual laws), but it works for now.
lolinder
> I'm sure Apple is going to delist it from the App Store at some point (App Store guidelines are just that, guidelines, and there's no getting around them with a weird loophole like you can do with actual laws), but it works for now.
Hence F-Droid, which cannot exist on iOS.
lxgr
Not yet! The EU’s Digital Markets Act will go into force soon.
idle_zealot
Does this actually work? I've tried a couple of times but it nearly always hangs on loading videos, and when it does load it gets stuck buffering every few seconds. Perhaps the Piped instance I'm connected too is overloaded?
ufish235
Any hint on how to actually do this? For those of us who are comfortable with Insidious or Newpipe.
scotty79
I had trouble switching to alternative clients because I rely on algorithmic feed for new content. However I have a perfect application for NewPipe. I like to run it quietly in the background as I fall asleep. Murmur of a voice too quiet to understand helps me sleep. Ads were making that use case impossible.
Another use case is downloading music I like. I used YouTube for music discovery an ingestion. Now after I find something good I go to NewPipe and dowlnoad it as local audio file and enjoy it like it's good old times of napster and mp3-s.
shiroiuma
>Now after I find something good I go to NewPipe and dowlnoad it as local audio file and enjoy it like it's good old times of napster and mp3-s.
I haven't tried NewPipe, but you can easily download audio streams on YouTube using yt-dlp. It even lets you see all the available stream options and pick the one you want, so if you prefer opus or aac, you can select that.
WaffleIronMaker
I also recommend GrayJay https://GrayJay.app
dawidpotocki
Just a small note about it: it's not open-source and their excuse is… pretty poor. They don't give you modification rights at all, so you can't even legally contribute to the project.
The platform support is implemented inside "plugins" and they are under AGPL-3.0, so… can you even distribute the application, considering that the licence of the application and plugins seem to be incompatible at my non-lawyer first glance?
Their excuse for their application licence so that they can legally prevent people from uploading ad-infested versions in Google Play and similar platforms under their name… but that's why MPL 2.0 and Apache 2.0 have trademark exclusion clauses.
beretguy
Louis Rossmann had a video introducing this app, but I can’t find it. Did YouTube force him to take down that video, anybody knows?
nickorlow
Yes... youtube gave the videos a community guideline strike and removed them. You can watch the videos in this thread: https://x.com/futo_tech/status/1719468941582442871?s=46
beretguy
Wow… that’s… dystopian.
wing-_-nuts
I tried that, and wanted to like it but the lack of video recommendations killed it for me. I couldn't even see videos from my subscriptions. Major disappointment.
SpaghettiCthulu
Subscriptions work perfectly for me. Better than on YouTube tbh.
Ruthalas
What are your experiences with it? Interested to hear a review from a user.
curvilinear_m
I use it as my main YouTube app on my phone, it's working nice. One drawback for me is the failure if you have too many YouTube subscriptions (>200-300). I removed some creators and it's working fine. You see Grayjay's likes and comments on videos but there are very few of them (you also see YouTube comments and likes). I wish the community around it grew, it has potential.
kim0
I use it daily, has been amazing so far
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Also, checkout NewPipe with built in SponsorBlock functionality:
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe