As of late, invidious has become pretty much unusable for me. All the instances either don’t work or are very slow, and as nobody knows Crystal more and more bugs keep cropping up (e.g. right now search is broken on all instances).

Are there any alternatives? I know of FreeTube but its client is Electron which is a no-go for me. I also know of youtube-dl, but I’m more interested in a website I can use to watch YouTube while proxied.

    • Ephera
      9•3 years ago

      Yeah, reading through these comments, it really becomes apparent that the open-source community invests more time into fixing YouTube than into its own platforms.

      I get that a lot of content is on YouTube, and even with the most amazing PeerTube code/instance/tool, you’d still want that content accessible, but it’s also clear that this is not sustainable.

      • ufra
        4•3 years ago

        I’m definitely rooting for peertube and use as much as possible, but I wouldn’t mind if invidious lived on as a small clunky niche project that flys somewhat undee the radar. Not sure the devs would agree…

    • ssenecaOP
      9•3 years ago

      However, another thing I’ve been doing, which is the long-term solution, is watching more PeerTube.

      Yeah PeerTube is awesome. I really wish literally any of those I follow on YT moved there though. I was hoping the recent controversy over YT turning on ads on all videos would make some people switch, but nope…

      • @4g4th4@lemmy.ml
        2•3 years ago

        There’s channels like CJU Games and Minetest Videos whom Youtube gives a fuck for paying them. How can’t they move to a Peertube instance?

    • Dessalines
      5•3 years ago

      Same here, I love newpipe. It can even do background playing queues, making it great as a jukebox / music player. And it has good resume support, so if you can’t finish a video, it saves your progress.

      But yeah I wish more channels would start using either peertube or torrents directly.

      • @bluerabbit@lemmy.ml
        5•3 years ago

        PeerTube is great but it’s hard to wade through sometimes. A suggestion for anyone who has some spare time: set up a community or two here on Lemmy for posting interesting new videos, peertube links only.

  • SnowCode
    8•3 years ago

    I can actually use the instance https://invidious.snopyta.org including the search engine. I also would like to find an alternative.

    The “freetube” software (kinda like NewPipe, but for computer) is maybe gonna turn interesting in the future (at the current moment it’s still based on invidious I think)

    Also, what I would like to get is not only something to watch YouTube. I would like to get an aggregator, so I could watch several platforms at the same time (like Peertube, YouTube and SoundCloud). That would be just awesome.

    • ssenecaOP
      2•3 years ago

      Also, what I would like to get is not only something to watch YouTube. I would like to get an aggregator, so I could watch several platforms at the same time (like Peertube, YouTube and SoundCloud). That would be just awesome.

      If I understand you correctly, you can get this behaviour by using youtube-dl. I have youtube-dl run every couple hours or so, pointed at a batch file that contains a list of YouTube channels as well as podcasts (which are sourced from various different sites). It records the content it downloads to an archive file so it knows not to download it again. And that’s how I keep up to date with most of the content I consume. Doesn’t solve the issue of browsing like with invidious, though.

      • @Niquarl@lemmy.ml
        1•3 years ago

        Would be great to get some sort of front-end GUI for that then if it works. Just a simple system where you have you subsriptions listed, the new videos from those subsriptions and maybe a system to automatically delete videos/podcast that you’ve watched/listened.

      • SnowCode
        2•3 years ago

        Well it doesn’t work for YouTube but I keep it in mind for the others :) Thanks

    • @je_vv@lemmy.ml
      1•3 years ago

      Freetube is no longer based on invidio.us instances. It provides its own local API by default, with the ability to fall back to the invidio.us one if the local one fails, and the default instance for falling back to invidio.us is the snopyta one. I guess at some point falling back won’t even be an option (once the local API gets more mature).

    • ufra
      1•3 years ago

      I can actually use the instance https://invidious.snopyta.org including the search engine. I also would like to find an alternative.

      same. it was broken for a day and some new glitches with channels popped up, but still beats using yt, especially with proxy option. I was watching all night tonight.

      one other thing that seems to work pretty well is going directly to the video which can be facilitated by following the rss feed for a channel you like, e.g. https://invidious.snopyta.org/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-id>

      • @abbenm@lemmy.ml
        3•3 years ago

        Yeah I think snopyta.org is the best invidious instance now, but now that it’s not being maintained, I think it’s just a matter of time before the whole thing dies.

        I think we should be reaching out to TY creators to mirror stuff on peertube.

    • @abbenm@lemmy.ml
      1•3 years ago

      For whatever reason, Foxydroid (an F-droid alternative) is refusing to update Newpipe on my phone. So it’s just staying broken.

      The cycle of breaking and unbreaking is frustrating at times, because Newpipe can go days if not weeks before being fixed, and I’m not sure I can trust it to keep being re-fixed forever.

      Meanwhile, something like VLC, or, say, leafpad on linux - there are versions of those programs that I know will just work, more or less forever. But the whack-a-mole with google devs who seem to purposely keep breaking scrapers does not leave me optimistic.

      • Ephera
        7•3 years ago

        NewPipe being broken is due to the fixed version not yet having been packaged for the official F-Droid repo.

        You can add the repo from the NewPipe devs to get these updates quicker: https://newpipe.schabi.org/blog/announcement/f-droid/pinned/f-droid-repo/
        You’ll have to export your current NewPipe data, uninstall NewPipe, then reinstall it (check that it’s a newer version) and then re-import data.

        Having said that, this NewPipe problem was actually my breaking point. Fuck YouTube. I’m finding my entertainment elsewhere.

        • @abbenm@lemmy.ml
          2•3 years ago

          Yeah, for whatever reason F-Droid is stuck on 0.20.1 so I had to manually download the newest version.

          Thanks for the repo! That definitely helps because Newpipe is the one F-droid thing I want to update regularly.

          • @Kamui@lemmy.ml
            2•3 years ago

            It’s the strangest thing, but Newpipe Legacy seems to have been updated (I think it was 0.20.2 last time I checked?) while the regular version has not seen an update in months.

  • @geopoliticssuck@lemmy.ml
    4•3 years ago

    Use the search engine of your choice to find the video you want to watch, then use mpv or vlc to watch it by running one of these players using the video link as an argument.

    Try this: $ mpv https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1np4y1r73P

    • Arran
      4•3 years ago

      I use this method too.

      Fun fact: My old Laptop doesn’t sit at 100% CPU running mpv but does on Youtube.

  • @Tabzlock@lemmy.ml
    3•3 years ago

    Yeah I found this when I was working on forking the project to have nicer ui and be easier to use. I just cant really see the project going to far into the future.

    I’m currently planning on working something (only an idea no progress) made in rust that could just proxy the youtube video and it can be used for embedding or run it in a tab.

    Eg(example domain). Rusttubeproxything.rs/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ Then it would open a simple player and run that in the tab and this could then be used in embedding youtube videos privately on your website or eventually used in a full platform like invidious.

    • Dreeg Ocedam
      1•3 years ago

      I’d go for Go for such a project, it’s more stable and productive than Rust, and the performance improvements of Rust aren’t necessary.

      Another solution would be to use NewPipe’s content extractor (in Java) and thus rewrite invidious in Java. That way the only thing necessary for maintenance would be to keep the content extractor up to date, which is a lot less work than having to keep invidious currently working.

      • @je_vv@lemmy.ml
        1•3 years ago

        Well, freetube sounds like a good alternative to help, and if electron is really not an option, perhaps creating a toolkit based (like Qt) UI for it. AFAIK, its local API is looking to get closer to the newpipe one to what it was before…

        • Dreeg Ocedam
          1•3 years ago

          I didn’t know freetube had its own content extractor.

          if electron is really not an option, perhaps creating a toolkit based (like Qt) UI for it

          I’m not sure if it would be any good since the extractor seems to be written in JS.

  • @nogerine@lemmy.ml
    2•3 years ago

    Is it that bad, though? The search works just fine (tested on https://invidious.snopyta.org and a local instance). The slowness is a bummer when using the remote instance, but a local one is blazing fast.

    A real problem may be that it connects your browser to googlevideo.com, from which it gets the video contents.

    • ssenecaOP
      1•3 years ago

      Ah yeah snopyta’s is working now, it was broken for a while though. And anyway, like you said, it’s so slow.

      The connection to googlevideo.com is an issue, and that’s why I only really use invidious with the Proxy video option enabled. That’s why I don’t run a local instance.

  • @Niquarl@lemmy.ml
    2•3 years ago

    With all the talk of using RSS, I wish there was a simple webpage or app that would allow to subscribe to any channels you want and give it to you. I suppose it would look more like a Podcast app in a way. You could even have more than just YouTube but also follow channels from PeerTube etc. Would be a pretty cool way to recover more independence from a single source.