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Invidious: an alternative front-end to YouTube

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Re: Invidious: an alternative front-end to YouTube

#105

What's your plan on possible user account terminations, if Google decides to act on their Terms Of Service? > YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube reasonably believes that its provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable. https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=GB&template=terms

They have clarified that this means they can terminate their services, not your accounts. However with recent balls ups it was easy to read it differently

This is not true. They can and will suspend your accounts for blocking ads or not being "Economically viable".

One reason I removed youtube vanced and reinstalled official youtube app.

Re: Invidious: an alternative front-end to YouTube

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have clarified that this means they can terminate their services, not your accounts. However with recent balls ups it was easy to read it differently

This is not true. They can and will suspend your accounts for blocking ads or not being "Economically viable". One reason I removed youtube vanced and reinstalled official youtube app.

Hmm. The reason doesn't look immediately obvious to me. What does your switching from Vanced to the official yt app have to do with someone's account getting suspended? Care to expand on it?

Re: Invidious: an alternative front-end to YouTube

#108

I've been consuming my YouTube videos via RSS and youtube-dl these days. I have a little python script that collects the video urls from the feed, downloads them, and then NewsBlur notifies me of the new videos. NewsBlur has become the way I find new academic papers (arXiv/journal RSS feeds), consume the news, webcomics, and YouTube videos.

Youtube-dl is an incredible tool, and supports far more than YouTube. I was pleased as punch yesterday to discover that Shoshana Zuboff's talk (shared to HN) on a video site I'd never previously heard of was supported.

There are other related tools.

VLC, both the desktop client (Linux, MacOS, Windows), and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Android client, can also stream video, most certainly from YouTube. Given the superiority of playback controls and for Picture-in-a-picture / pop-up view, this is my preferred option for Android when I want video, generally.

mps-youtube is an absolutely amazeballs console-based YouTube client. It offers search (text, title, channel), playlists, preferred search context (music or all), playback (audio only, video, resolution), and local client(s).

My preferred mode is to curate a playlist off of various searches, and to play that back, either through mps-youtube, or another player capable of using a local file. A disadvantage of mps-youtube is an application-based API cap which doesn't seem to apply to other options.

mpv is a console multimedia player, successor to mplayer, which can integrate with youtube-dl via the '--ytdl' switch. This means you can stream any youtube-dl supported streaming service or target, from raw MP3s or Oggs, to YouTube, Vimeo, and numerous other online media platforms.

I've been making (slightly) increased use of RSS, but have yet to wire that into my media player(s).

All of the console options work in Android under Termux, a Linux-like console userland that's one of the very few things on Android which Does Not Manifestly Suck.

Re: Invidious: an alternative front-end to YouTube

#110

While an interesting project, at first glance I don't really see what this front-end brings to YouTube compared to the original front-end. Speed, maybe? But this comes at the cost the UX. I would much rather see something like this implemented: https://uxdesign.cc/my-attempt-at-redesigning-youtube-for-a-...

No ads.

No (direct) YouTube tracking.

No need to sign in for 18+ / age restricted video.

Within the past few days, YouTube's mobile website has changed the player, for me, removing:

- Removing double tap left/right to skip forward/back within the video.

- Removing mute audio control.

- Adding skip forward/back in playlist. A feature I never use (YT's suggestions suck, I curate my own playlist.)

For now, Invidious retains the old player controls, allowing me to mute annoying-ass video and skip forward/back to repeat / bypass interesting / annoying bits.

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