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Delivering the bits is not the hard part of making a successful video platform. It's other stuff like recommendations and content discovery that is actually useful, allowing creators to monetize enough that they want to be on your platform, navigating legal issues, fighting spam and abuse, and getting enough users to sign up and start using your service.

Peer to peer died because (1) a lot of the world, especially outside the US, has terrible upload/bandwidth, (2) HTTPS CDNs got _really_ cheap, far cheaper that p2p technologies like BitTorrent+WebSeed.

There are a minority of users who care about being able to host videos that violate YouTube/TikTok/Instagram policies. Unfortunately, a significant part of that minority is working with infringing or illegal content, which both prevents ad networks from working with you and attracts attention from law enforcement.

That would put users at risk of being sued/punished for copyright infrigement.

Pretty much worse user experience guaranteed, plz no.

this is exactly why i worked on webtorrent ~13 years ago https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

there exist distributed alternatives like joinpeertube.org but they never really take off. Consumers like centralization, look at twitter.

yes, will you also be providing the caching server? Because that's the main blocker I think, nobody has the resources to cache them.

I honestly don't see how those two things are related.

The problem with P2P video is that it's expensive to host and most of the people using it are going to use it for child abuse. It makes it not realistic.

Is it a problem for you that YouTube's watch history is littered with videos you didn't watch, but got recorded as being watched because the mouse pointer moved over one of their suggestions for a moment.

I have watch history in NewPipe just fine? And I find it very convenient to know what I've already watched. All local, Google doesn't need to store it for you / you can't lose access to it

NewPipe has a one-click download button. If one follows channels with mainly-audio content that one may want to listen to later, possibly away from an internet connection, that is super-handy.

NewPipe also lets you export your subscriptions (which is just a bunch of links to RSS feeds), so you aren't shackled to Android/RSS.

Solid take, these days most apps are just glorified browser wrappers and you don't miss out on anything. In fact, you could have a separate browser with all these saving modes disabled just for the youtube use case.

One of the reasons why I use an app to view YouTube is to disable suggested videos and comments. Basically, I want to have a personalized list of the channels I view as worth watching and I want to discourage continued watching outside of those boundaries.

I use NewPipe so I can subscribe to channels and put channels/videos into playlists, without needing to make a youtube account.

Have you tried the Firefox extension "Video Background Play Fix"?

This has worked flawlessly for me on every phone I've used.

Have you tried disabling the Page Visibility API? Web apps will sometimes use that to try and mess with background playing, IIRC.

agreeable argument. I am also running towards firefox, but keeping the firefox open, juggling between the tabs, especially the quirks YT poses on Firefox, these apps poses a usecase. Yes, download/subscribe/SB support etc. Currently using libretube mostly.

> Used through all of the apps and personally there's little incentive for me not to use Firefox/Fennec.

Your comment made me try Firefox for the Nth time right now.

And the rendering is still bad like I remembered it. Download the image locally and open it in an image viewer so you actually view the pixels 1:1, then see if you can tell which one is Firefox (I can): https://imgur.com/a/FsXuoa3

I'm staying with Chrome.

I think it's been about 6 months or more for me and I am also very satisfied with it. I left NewPipe because I'd often have to wait days to weeks for simple fixes to get implemented. PipePipe is patched very often.

Same. My only issue (with NewPipe also) is that at ~50 subscribed channels, Google rate limits me when I refresh. I wish there was better logic to get new content or a way to space it out over an amount of time.

Same. It's also less buggy, and they've fixed long-standing navigation gripes I had with NewPipe. I did disable the SponsorBlock integration because I find it quite annoying to go back on a skipped sequence.

No (realistic) amount of money can protect an app like this from Alphabet. It's their service, and clients like NewPipe are always at risk of being depreciated forever.

How is blocking in-video apps stealing from creators? If the advertiser pays them per view, your view still counts. If they pay a commission per purchase, it doesn't matter if you skipped the ad if you wouldn't have bought the product anyway, and I doubt you buy every single advertised products to support creators.

You’re free to put ads and I’m free to not watch them. What the issue ?

I respect your stance. A couple counter points from personal experience: even if I can't skip the ads, I'm not paying attention - I immediately mute/tune out. And the ads are typically so obnoxious that the reflex to ignore/avoid is only magnified. Is that so different from having a mechanism to auto skip/mute?

Posting YouTube videos can just be a hobby - it was in the beginning, and that was fine. It's OK if posting a video isn't a profitable career path. Enthusiasts > "creators".

And in-video ads like these are even less defensible given that they still show up when people are paying YouTube (and creators by extension) to not display ads.

Out of the options "creators released content only behind paywalls", "users steal from creators", and "creators incentivised platforms to lobby to remove user freedom so users can't steal from creators", what actually happened was, by far, my least preferable option.

Why don’t you care about privacy specifically in this context?

Oh? I recently stopped using revanced when updates stopped and my older revanced stopped working correctly. Is it back?

Does it auto-update now? I like its UI better than PipePipe, but I got so sick of hand-updating Vanced (including hand-downloading the correct apk and waiting several minutes for the patches to run against it) every time Google breaks Youtube again. There was a period of Warfare last year where Google would make breaking changes more than once a week...

PipePipe is so nice with the fast auto-updates. If I ever even catch it breaking, I just have to use Firefox for a few hours and then F-Droid ships the fix and PipePipe works again.

Morphe just patches the YouTube app no? Then you need to still use that abomination. NewPipe/PipePipe is fast, lightweight and I couldn't care less about any "features" other than watching a video.

What's the benefit of Morphe over Revanced? I've been using Vanced or Revanced for years, but I'm willing to change.

Bad name though, first few results for "Morphe" is a well-known make-up brand.

> Just noticed, now that Tubular is no longer maintained

How have you just noticed that when Tubular reliably broke every single month when YouTube changes something and you had to wait for weeks for it to be fixed? It was barely maintained for a long time now

I’m using https://github.com/Tonwalter888/YouMod on my iPhone and I’m very satisfied. It has integrated adblock, sponsorblock, and despite being modded stock YouTube app it has tons of features, like completely removing shorts from the app, customizing the UI, and more.

Get https://github.com/yattee/yattee

I've been watching youtube without ads on all Apple hardware for years.

I use invidious as backend.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

Absolutely fabulous.

Connect to VPN in Albania and you will get ad free YouTube experience. You are welcome.

Although not a direct equivalent, but check out Unwatched [1].

[1]: https://github.com/fer0n/Unwatched

Yep, it’s pretty much the reason I don’t use Youtube on my iPhone almost at all.

It’s probably a good thing, actually.

From https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertisi...:

> In summary, it can be said that sponsoring is a good approach. It is fair and non-discriminating to all users, preserves their privacy, lets creators select their partners themselves, and provides them with a larger share of the revenue. Even though there are some disadvantages, it is more or less beneficial for all sides. [...] Ethical advertising, for example through sponsorship, should therefore not be touched by us. This would turn our key selling proposition from being privacy-friendly to being a gatekeeper for advertising. And this is not what NewPipe ever has been or wants to be. We’ve always stressed that NewPipe’s main goal is to protect the users by maintaining their privacy, not to, e.g., provide features a user would otherwise have to pay for, for free. Regarding SponsorBlock: after a lot of discussion within the team, we decided not to support this system. As stated earlier, we don’t consider advertising in general problematic. It’s the unethical, privacy-invasive systems that are very common today which we consider evil. Sponsorship provides a mostly ethical way of advertising.

They wrote about it here: https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertisi...

Firefox with sponsorblock installed and ublock origin?

Freetube is pretty great, also you can import your newpipe subs. Http://Freetubeapp.io

Shameless promotion here but I think https://channelsurfer.tv is a good experience.

Brave browser.

I'm not sure about transferring subscriptions between Pipe and Brave...?

Grayjay I'd say. Also works great on Android.

It's not that well known, but mpv supports playing youtube videos. I think you need yt-dlp installed.

Freetube if it's still working? I haven't tried it in a while.

Chrome with sponsorblock and ublock origin lite

Yes, it happens quite often recently. I think, their approach is "dominate and tolerate" in a controllable way, so they know quite a bit about who is actually using NewPipe, yt-dlp, etc. and they tolerate it in order to have a kind of leverage to preserve their monopoly. Then if number of out-of-official-app views becomes like above certain point, they aggressively block with "bot detected" message.

totally...

Funnily what I found was to install 1.1.1.1 from cloudflare. Enable that. PipePipe works perfectly.