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Stepping away from open source

omar.yt

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Re: Stepping away from open source

#21

Post by ahBef5ei »

gavinray wrote: post #12

For anyone unfamiliar, Invidious is just Youtube without ads and it lets you turn the screen off on mobile. It also lets you turn videos to an "audio only" mode for speed/bandwidth. It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use. It's basically free Youtube Red. Really sad to hear this, hope the creator is better off for it though.

It's also the only way I know to have RSS feeds for youtube channels. I hope other instances won't follow invidio.us, that would be a major loss for me. I could run my own instance of course, but then, running an instance to generate a RSS feed to consume it would feel overkilled, better to run a scrapper from cron directly.

Anyway, Invidious was an extremely useful tool, thanks to the author for making it.

Re: Stepping away from open source

#22

Post by notdiaphone »

What struck me is this:

> I can't help shake the feeling that somewhere, the software I use is being developed solely by volunteers who would rather quit, but don't have the ability to say "no".

I've witnessed a number of developers similarly burn out in the last years. This suggest either the opensource movement attracts people prone to such burn-outs or that it produces them. The general reaction tends to be a bit of sympathy mixed with a hard-nosed "Well, it's difficult. Some make it, some don't" attitude. Yet given the trend we seem to ignore a fundamental flaw in how we're working, interacting, consuming, supporting, and rewarding one another. Even Shuttleworth cited a kind of opensource community fatigue when he killed off the phone project. It disappoints me to think that the opensource world talks a lot about freedom at the same time we have Omar's suggestion that those working in it really are not free.

Re: Stepping away from open source

#23

Post by input_sh »

ahBef5ei wrote: post #21
gavinray wrote: post #12

For anyone unfamiliar, Invidious is just Youtube without ads and it lets you turn the screen off on mobile. It also lets you turn videos to an "audio only" mode for speed/bandwidth. It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use. It's basically free Youtube Red. Really sad to hear this, hope the creator is better off for it though.

It's also the only way I know to have RSS feeds for youtube channels. I hope other instances won't follow invidio.us, that would be a major loss for me. I could run my own instance of course, but then, running an instance to generate a RSS feed to consume it would feel overkilled, better to run a scrapper from cron directly. Anyway, Invidious was an extremely useful tool, thanks to the author for making it.

YouTube channels do have their own feeds, but there's no obvious way to get to them.

If it's a small channel, you can just copy the channel ID. Visit their YouTube channel, look at the URL, and construct your URL like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
If it's a larger channel, then the channel ID will be replaced by custom string and you'll have to look at the page source to find the channel ID.

You can also export all of your channels as OPML, which is actually documented (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en) and upload it to your RSS reader.

Re: Stepping away from open source

#24

Post by ahBef5ei »

input_sh wrote: post #23
ahBef5ei wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also the only way I know to have RSS feeds for youtube channels. I hope other instances won't follow invidio.us, that would be a major loss for me. I could run my own instance of course, but then, running an instance to generate a RSS feed to consume it would feel overkilled, better to run a scrapper from cron directly. Anyway, Invidious was an extremely useful tool, thanks to the author for making it.

YouTube channels do have their own feeds, but there's no obvious way to get to them. If it's a small channel, you can just copy the channel ID. Visit their YouTube channel, look at the URL, and construct your URL like this: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID If it's a larger channel, then the channel ID will be replaced by custom string and you'll have to look at the page source to find th…

Oh, nice. That certainly saves a lot of trouble in my case, thanks a lot :)

Re: Stepping away from open source

#25

Post by ZinniaZirconium »

glenstein wrote: post #19
ZinniaZirconium wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been other alternatives in the past and there will be other alternatives in the future. I've found the most reliable option is to run my own and not rely on someone else's service which can break at any time and disappear at any time. Interfacing with YouTube in any unofficial way is fraught with peril by its very nature because YouTube is always trying to stop it.

I'm glad that we have the option to self-host, and would be curious to learn more if you have other self-hosted youtube frontend options. As it stands now I think if invidious isn't maintained it will likely break soon. Newpipe breaks every other week and it's actively maintained. Invidious I found to be uniquely and particularly convenient because, for a while at least, it ran like any other website and I could skip…

There's also this which includes a frontend:

https://github.com/Athlon1600/youtube-downloader

I'm unaffiliated but I like to follow this particular project when I want to know if others are having the same trouble with YouTube when things break for me. I only ever implemented a backend myself when I chose to self host.

Re: Stepping away from open source

#26

Post by grugagag »

Im sad to see invideo.us go, I was a casual user and loved the simplicity of it. But the reality is that open source goodwill projects have a cost in resources and free cannot really survive as free in the long term, whoever is maintaining the software has a life and bills.

Re: Stepping away from open source

#28

Post by ZinniaZirconium »

glenstein wrote: post #19
ZinniaZirconium wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been other alternatives in the past and there will be other alternatives in the future. I've found the most reliable option is to run my own and not rely on someone else's service which can break at any time and disappear at any time. Interfacing with YouTube in any unofficial way is fraught with peril by its very nature because YouTube is always trying to stop it.

I'm glad that we have the option to self-host, and would be curious to learn more if you have other self-hosted youtube frontend options. As it stands now I think if invidious isn't maintained it will likely break soon. Newpipe breaks every other week and it's actively maintained. Invidious I found to be uniquely and particularly convenient because, for a while at least, it ran like any other website and I could skip…

I'm gonna reconsider using Athlon1600/youtube-downloader in my projects but from what I remember of benchmarks I did about 8 months ago my fork of youtubedown was faster like obtain a video url in 300ms faster. In my projects I lazy load the video on demand when the user pushes play instead of preloading video at page load so minimizing the time to obtain a video url matters to me.

Re: Stepping away from open source

#29

Post by saurik »

ZinniaZirconium wrote: post #3

Oh that's a shame. > The API will continue to function until October 1st, to give time for any services relying on it to migrate to other solutions. Aw no. I was thinking about using invidio.us in my own projects but now I guess I won't! I have need of a YouTube streaming server, backend only, which I can embed on a web page. I made my own with youtubedown and bash but maintaining it is a pain since YouTube is always…

Why did you decide to fork youtubedown?

Re: Stepping away from open source

#30

Post by ZinniaZirconium »

saurik wrote: post #29
ZinniaZirconium wrote: post #3

Oh that's a shame. > The API will continue to function until October 1st, to give time for any services relying on it to migrate to other solutions. Aw no. I was thinking about using invidio.us in my own projects but now I guess I won't! I have need of a YouTube streaming server, backend only, which I can embed on a web page. I made my own with youtubedown and bash but maintaining it is a pain since YouTube is always…

Why did you decide to fork youtubedown?

I forked youtubedown because it has too many features. I don't want to download any files and I don't want to mux DASH formats. All I want is a script that prints the 360p video url as fast as possible. And JWZ broke support for premuxed video which I added back. And JWZ broke support for requesting a specific cipher which I added back. Basically youtubedown development went in a direction which diverged from my use case.
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