Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end • Hacker News Board

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#11

Post by scosman » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 12:07 PM UTC

Invidious is a good piped alternative for those starting to look at this space: https://invidious.io/

Yattee is a good front end app for both piped and invidious for Apple TV (and iOS and macOS but I prefer the browser on those platforms)

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#12

Post by jollyllama » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 12:12 PM UTC

Every time I try to go to a Piped instance, it fails to load the video. Updates/quotas are even worse than Nitter instances, I think.

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#13

Post by paulryanrogers » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 12:12 PM UTC

crtasm wrote: post #9

CalRobert wrote: post #4

How will tools like this persist after Google enforces WEI for people using youtube?

Considering how many viewers they have using televisions/set top boxes/streaming usb sticks that will never get an update, do you see that happening any time soon?

These won't be supported forever

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#14

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 12:14 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #4

How will tools like this persist after Google enforces WEI for people using youtube?

[deleted]

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#15

Post by cornfutes » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 12:43 PM UTC

I was just thinking yesterday that there needs to be a 3rd party tool that reintroduces the thumbs down button.

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#16

Post by yard2010 » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 12:50 PM UTC

I have to say that the crypto space is doomed and nobody cares about decentralization, but the technology behind it enables doing exactly this: 1 backend and many different clients. IMO this is the future - breaking monopolies with separation of powers a la John Locke

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#17

Post by sheepscreek » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 12:53 PM UTC

I am a paying YT Premium customer and am honestly deeply frustrated by their child proofing controls. The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.”

The sudden interest/surge in custom YT frontends has inspired me to build a custom TV app with tighter controls.

Does anyone know how they work? Are they using YouTube private API directly, or running a full blown shadow browser and siphoning data into the custom front-end?

Update: edited for clarity

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#18

Post by boesboes » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 1:02 PM UTC

Since they have started blocking invidious instances, I've switched to the Freetube app as a YT client. Work great imo & no dependence on external services/hosts. Hopefully they are not plannign on enforcing WEI soon..

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#19

Post by ruune » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 1:04 PM UTC

sheepscreek wrote: post #17

I am a paying YT Premium customer and am honestly deeply frustrated by their child proofing controls. The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.” The sudden interest/surge in custom YT fr…

Web scraping [0] and grabbing the googlevideo stream from there [1], at least in the case of invidious

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious

[1] https://docs.invidious.io/faq/#q-what-data-is-shared-with-yo...

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#20

Post by tym0 » Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

sheepscreek wrote: post #17

I am a paying YT Premium customer and am honestly deeply frustrated by their child proofing controls. The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.” The sudden interest/surge in custom YT fr…

I use LibreTube[0] on my phone which is a client for Piped so you can probably make your TV App a client as well so you don't have to do the scraping yourself.

[0] https://github.com/libre-tube/LibreTube