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NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

newpipe.net

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Re: NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

#32

Post by [deleted] »

foepys wrote: post #15
charcircuit wrote: post #6

NewPipe not having essential features like the home tab (recommended videos) or My Mix make the app almost useless to me. Not supporting livestream chat or being able to watch member streams (or videos) is also another big deal breaker for me. NewPipe also can't show community posts or give me notifications when a creator uploads a video or makes a community post. I keep the app installed as a quick way to watch vide…

NewPipe is specifically designed to be privacy first. This means no account, no client-side tracking, as few web requests as possible, and everything (e.g. watch history and subscriptions) is saved offline. Thus it is impossible to show non-generically recommended videos or to enable chat.

[deleted]

Re: NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

#33

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

foepys wrote: post #15
charcircuit wrote: post #6

NewPipe not having essential features like the home tab (recommended videos) or My Mix make the app almost useless to me. Not supporting livestream chat or being able to watch member streams (or videos) is also another big deal breaker for me. NewPipe also can't show community posts or give me notifications when a creator uploads a video or makes a community post. I keep the app installed as a quick way to watch vide…

NewPipe is specifically designed to be privacy first. This means no account, no client-side tracking, as few web requests as possible, and everything (e.g. watch history and subscriptions) is saved offline. Thus it is impossible to show non-generically recommended videos or to enable chat.

"... as few web requests as possible..."

That depends on what we agree should be the minimum functionality. On computers with physical keyboards I have always searched YouTube and downloaded from the command line. No youtube-dl, no scripting languages, just a couple of tiny Bourne shell scripts. YouTbe has always made this very easy. The functionality I need is (a) search (b) retrieve textual video information and (c) retrieve video. The only domains required to do that, IME, are (1) www.youtube.com for (a) and (b), and (2) googlevideo.com subdomains for (c). It is possible to use these tiny scripts on an Android phone with Termux. It was surprising to see NewPipe, installed from F-Droid, trying to make requests to the following unnecessary domains:

  speech.googlepapis.com
  clients3.google.com
  clients4.google.com
  app-measurement.com
  growth-pa.googleapis.com
  deviceintegritytokens.growth-pa.googleapis.com
  firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com
  android.googleapis.com
  www.googleapis.com
  play.googleapis.com
  android.apis.google.com
  youtubeei.googleapis.com
  suggestqueries.google.com
NB. I block all these and the app still works fine.

I have never tried to use a YouTube app. Perhaps NewPipe is meant to be compared to a YouTube app not to use of the YouTube website. The scripts I write for YouTube are in response to the annoyances of using the YouTube website, including all the gratuitous requests to unnecessary domains.

"[A]s few web requests as possible" depends on what functionality the user wants. For example, if the user must have thumbnails then we must make requests to ytimg.com subdomains. Otherwise there is no need to make requests to ytimg.com subdomains. Because I only want to search, read JSON and download video, I do not need to make requests to the above domains that NewPipe tries to reach.

Re: NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

#34

Post by anonymousab »

chrysoprace wrote: post #17

NewPipe is great but it breaks quite frequently due to the use of unofficial YouTube APIs. I tried to get my girlfriend on it because she was annoyed by all the ads but it kept breaking every month. Vanced is nice but a weakness for both is that they can't support casting on a non-jailbroken device (and I suspect the issue won't be solved by jailbreaking).

A more reliable option might be to use Firefox for Android with ublock origin. The site UX is not as good, though.

Re: NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

#35

Post by 0xdeadb00f »

gitgud wrote: post #27

Are these kinds of "Youtube Client's" against the terms of service of Youtube? I can't imagine they would like appreciate these features: Play in background No proprietary Google APIs

It does break YT/Google TOS. Which is why it isn't allowed on the play store.

Re: NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

#36

Post by ttybird2 »

foepys wrote: post #9
vincengomes wrote: post #4

One of the biggest strengths of Vanced over NewPipe when i tried them both was SponsorBlock [0] Is there a similar feature available in Newpipe now? [0]: https://sponsor.ajay.app/

NewPipe does not see themselves as a project focused on blocking ads but as a privacy first project. See their reasoning for rejecting the sponsor block PR here: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/pull/3205 One can disagree with their decision but I can understand why they did this and since somebody offers builds, I don't understand why people are often angry towards the NewPipe maintainers.

Also this https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/2554

Re: NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

#39

Post by xrd »

Does this or Vanced help with the problem I have: my kids are being brainwashed via Google's algorithms?

More specifically, I hate that when they watch YouTube it is pushing really shitty content on them.

Is there a way with either of these apps to filter out things I don't want them to watch, or perhaps even have a list of things I only want them to watch?

I don't think my kids would notice if they couldn't get Ninja Kidz and their spammy Walmart plastic crap they are always shilling to my kids.

Re: NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android

#40

Post by rjzzleep »

xrd wrote: post #39

Does this or Vanced help with the problem I have: my kids are being brainwashed via Google's algorithms? More specifically, I hate that when they watch YouTube it is pushing really shitty content on them. Is there a way with either of these apps to filter out things I don't want them to watch, or perhaps even have a list of things I only want them to watch? I don't think my kids would notice if they couldn't get Ninj…

What about just removing the youtube app from the tablet you give your child?
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