Vanced has been discontinued • Hacker News Board

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#211

Post by Shared404 » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:09 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #136

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it very flaky in the past. Half the time it can't load a video or it crashes while playing the video. I'd understand if some of the issues came from being throttled the way yt-dl does, but the Android user agent that my phone has (which is the workaround that yt-dlp uses right now to be unthrottled) should present unthrottled downloads. I have a better experience having a service running on my seedbox whic…

The app has been very stable for me for years now. It breaks every so often when YouTube changes its APIs, but the devs are quick to update it, so it rarely inconveniences me for long.

> It breaks every so often when YouTube changes its APIs

Slight nitpick here - NewPipe doesn't use any API's directly, just scrapes the webpage.

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#212

Post by readams » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:10 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #105

CountHackulus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My big issue is the backgrounding. I like watching a video while cooking, but I also need to use timers. Not having the video stop and re-orient itself to portrait while I quickly set or dismiss a timer is excellent. I also find the UI during live streams to be borderline unusable on mobile.

This is my primary use case for Newpipe. There is another workaround by using desktop mode in Firefox Android.

If you run Firefox nightly, it's possible to enable additional extensions, including background video fix.

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#213

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:11 AM UTC

sreevisakh wrote: post #185

sonicggg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised they did not have a plan for this. I thought Vanced would be based in a more "rebel" country like Russia, which is what Sci-Hub does. A Cease and Desist letter from Google would be meaningless there. Were they trying to pull this off in the USA, or other Western countries?

You reminded me of SciHub. What is the prospect of being able to avail it in the future, given the current situation in Russia?

I thought it was run by someone in Kazakhstan, so it's not wholly dependent on Russia.

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#214

Post by tentacleuno » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:11 AM UTC

j1elo wrote: post #156

0xTJ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mobile YouTube site is one of the worst usability experiences out there.

You need to see the clusterfuck that is Twitter.com mobile site, it's so slow and laggy that it makes YT seem like a perfectly good page.

I really don't understand what they were thinking. They made such a big deal of the site being mobile-friendly, yet it's unbelievably slow and laggy. It's a lot of marketing that quickly falls apart in practice.

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#215

Post by Shared404 » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:12 AM UTC

nonbirithm wrote: post #50

rchaud wrote: post #42

There aren't many moments where I truly feel dismay at the end of something's lifecycle, but this definitely is one. Vanced made mobile YouTube tolerable. I have NewPipe but it's not the same. Hopefully as the tweet says, it will stay functional for a while longer.

For me, it made YouTube so tolerable that I would spend significant amounts of time on it. Sometimes I get the feeling that a side effect of adblockers is that they unintentionally act as enablers for addicting platforms. At times, it's worth thinking about what you're using adblock to accomplish at a higher level. For me it was subjecting myself to YouTube's recommendations for several more hours per day. Luckily I…

I listen to/read this somewhat frequently as a reminder to keep in mind what I ise the internet for.

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#216

Post by tentacleuno » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:13 AM UTC

sphars wrote: post #12

armujahid wrote: post #3

They didn't mention why they are discontinuing it.

According to a mod in the Discord server, it was indeed a cease and desist: https://twitter.com/linuxct/status/1503081083486810120

According to their reply to that tweet, it wasn't a mod, just someone who had the same role colour.

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#217

Post by tentacleuno » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:17 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #118

izacus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that (legally and technically) work exactly? And how would you defend even the hacks themselves against DMCA?

The lines of code that were generated are copyrighted by the person who wrote them, so they probably can't be DMCA'd easily. The offsets (and possibly the algorithm for finding those offsets) are harder to protect, of course. The problem, of course, is that bogus DMCA claims are enough to take down a repository, and protesting those DMCA claims will dox you to the big tech companies. Every time a project like this go…

> Every time a project like this goes down, I feel more like there should be some kind of Gitea server hosted on a hidden service where "illegal" projects like these can be developed.

While not a Gitea server per se (GitLab instead), git.rip used to be a well-known host for pirated content, leaked source code, and various other things. If I remember correctly, the amount of content on there was in the hundreds of terabytes, which would have made it very hard to externally archive (not even taking into account bandwidth restrictions).

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#218

Post by MathCodeLove » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:18 AM UTC

rakoo wrote: post #132

CPAhem wrote: post #62

For those who have the ability to do so, please make an Archive of all the Vanced Versions before the download links are taken down https://mirror.codebucket.de/vanced/

Vanced was proprietary, it's too bad for users but I won't shed a tear for its developers and would actually advise against doing anything that keeps it living. The very fact that there is a need to get apk archives before the links die is an artifact of being proprietary and would not have been an issue with Libre Software. The only way that makes sense for all of us as a democratic society is to keep control, and t…

I don't get this argument against proprietary software. People building software should be able to expect payment for their work and effort.

Food is required for a healthy society but would anyone here advocate for farmers to give away all of their produce for free?

Text-tiles are necessary for society but would you advocate that clothing be provided by the creators free of charge?

The only thing different about software is that little to no physical resources are required as a prerequisite to its production, but an individuals time and energy is.

A world in which no one was paid to write software would be a world with much worse offerings than what we currently have and would be a net loss for humanity.

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#219

Post by kazinator » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

MathCodeLove wrote: post #218

rakoo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vanced was proprietary, it's too bad for users but I won't shed a tear for its developers and would actually advise against doing anything that keeps it living. The very fact that there is a need to get apk archives before the links die is an artifact of being proprietary and would not have been an issue with Libre Software. The only way that makes sense for all of us as a democratic society is to keep control, and t…

I don't get this argument against proprietary software. People building software should be able to expect payment for their work and effort. Food is required for a healthy society but would anyone here advocate for farmers to give away all of their produce for free? Text-tiles are necessary for society but would you advocate that clothing be provided by the creators free of charge? The only thing different about soft…

> People building software should be able to expect payment for their work and effort.

But, but, ... Vanced is free-as-in-beer software that prevents Google getting ad revenue for their product/service.

Re: Vanced has been discontinued

#220

Post by kazinator » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 2:23 AM UTC

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #196

chii wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The diff patches would be considered derivative, since you cannot make it without knowing the original.

Courts have interpreted derivative works to be so when at least some parts of it contain the original copyrighted work. If that test fails, the whole derivative work argument is null and void.

Do you know of a precedent?

I wouldn't want to be the one with my neck on the line in court over this.

Consider that .torrent files also don't have the content, yet torrent sites which serve them and provide tracking for torrent clients are having to play cat and mouse with copyright holders.