What do you use to private watch YouTube?

ComradeMiao@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 78 points –

Moving away from Google. I just added my fav subs into my rss feed but that isn’t an enough to get good recs. What else can one do? Alternative front ends that work?

67

Freetube on Linux, newpipe on android and maybe a private invidious instance.

I use YT-DLP to scrip the download of vids I want to watch and it drops them into Plex for me. I set it to run every 4 hours.

Oooh, this is interesting! How do you get the script to get latest videos from your subscribers?

Can't speak to his method, but the jellyfin media sever has a YouTube plugin called Fintube that uses the above downloader to integrate YouTube content.

Interesting, wonder if I can do something similar with Plex

I just moved over to jellyfin from plex. I highly recommend it. It's way more streamlined and active than plex, with a seriously good plugin community. No investor based bloat.

The only issue I had was that jellyfin would crash on scanning my very old music library, where plex would not. To fix it, I used musicbrainz picard to correctly add idv3 tags and remove illegal characters from song names. Now, its smooth as silk.

All the plugin talk about jellyfin makes me want to switch wish Plex kept support for them. Jellyfin does seem to make way bigger strides than Plex these days

Honestly, you should swap. They have tons of excellent plugins.. The intro skip alone is way better than Plex's.

The end user clients are very solid too. Their kodi client alone is leagues ahead of the plex community one.

The only feature that plex has over jellyfin at this point in my mind is sharing content easy with people out of your home network. With Jellyfin you need to setup your own certs or reverse proxy like SWAG, or use something like tailscale.

Yea I also believe (could be wrong) the Sonic analysis for music and Plex amp is much better than what finamp provides

Edit: I did run both about a year ago just to see the differences so it would not be hard for me to spin it back up

Edit 2: prob going to because I want to test the YouTube and twitch plugins tbh

Hmm, not using finamp. I'm pretty happy with Synfonuim.

Cant speak to that aspect.

Ok I've heard alot of good things from that according to this Reddit post it has most features minus the DJ witch is cool and I use but I like trying out new apps and it's got a free trial and only a 5$ purchase so pretty cheap all things considered.

Ohh yeah, it's very slick. Really deep features, compatible with everything, great UI.

Its the same dev that made Yatze, the best kodi app remote, so it was a quick sell for me.

I just tried this on an Ultra.cc seedbox with yt-dlp installed, and the Fintube plugin configured to the right path for that, yet when I go to Dashboard > Fintube and click the Submit button to add a video to the download, nothing happens. Can't figure out what's wrong.

Maybe Jellyfin doesn't have the necessary write permissions to write the file to that folder, but I'm not quite sure how to change those on such a seedbox, if that's the case.

Any experience with this to share? Would the Submit button usually lead to a different view, or does it just stay on that video submission screen while the download happens silently in the background? The lack of action I experience when clicking it feels a bit awkward...

So there's 2 files that go along with the main script: a config file and a download list.

The download list file is literally a list of YT channel URLs and any time I want it to get new channels, I add to the list. Conversely if I get tired of watching a channel, I comment it out or just delete it. YT-DLP just traverses the list.

The config is where the magic happens. That dictates how the file is named, quality you download at, location it's saved to, format, etc. You can incorporate SponsorBlock which is awesome and even DeArrow has an integration. I enjoy the logging feature so it doesn't re-download vids it's already snagged. Generally I'll tell it to get every video from a channel that's been posted in the last 15 days.

My destination for the files is a YouTube library folder I set up in Plex. Plex sees it just as another TV-like library and it pulls the metadata from the files, which are embedded by YT-DLP.

Hope this helps!

I use a private Piped instance

Can you show your docker-compose? I've tried several times without succeeding 🤧

You can't just ask that. Not without at least taking them out to a fancy dinner first. Maybe a little dancing.

Before anything, you'll want to create a folder for the unix socket: mkdir /var/run/ytproxy and chown it to your reverse proxy's user and group.

The Docker files:

::: spoiler compose.yml

services:
  piped-frontend:
    image: 1337kavin/piped-frontend:latest
    container_name: piped-frontend
    environment:
      BACKEND_HOSTNAME: $API_ENDPOINT
    depends_on:
      - piped
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - proxy

  piped-proxy:
    image: 1337kavin/piped-proxy:latest
    container_name: piped-proxy
    environment:
      - UDS=1
    volumes:
      - /var/run/ytproxy:/app/socket  # unix socket location
    user: 1000:1000
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - proxy

  piped:
    image: 1337kavin/piped:latest
    container_name: piped-backend
    volumes:
      - ./piped/config/config.properties:/app/config.properties:ro
    depends_on:
      - piped-db
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - backend_piped
      - proxy

  piped-db:
    image: pgautoupgrade/pgautoupgrade:16-alpine
    container_name: piped-db
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_DB=$DB_NAME
      - POSTGRES_USER=$DB_USER
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$DB_PASS
    volumes:
      - ./piped/pgdb:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - backend_piped

networks:
  backend_piped:

  proxy:
    external: true

:::

::: spoiler .env

API_ENDPOINT=  # no scheme prefix (ex. pipedapi.domain.example)
DB_NAME=
DB_USER=
DB_PASS=

:::

To configure the reverse proxy (I use nginx), you can use Piped's recommended files with your domains. The linked repo also contains a template for the required config.properties.

Let me know if you run into issues, I'll be glad to help 🙂

I just watch it on youtube.com without logging in. Sacrificing convenience and using some frontend that only work if you pray hard is not something I want to do daily-drive

There are some periods where YouTube make changes frequently so that e.g. FreeTube stops working for some time, but for the most part it works reliably well. I would say it provides a much better convenience than watching on youtube.com logged out, as you have profiles, subscriptions, playlist and history. Including adblock, sponsorblock and dearrow, and granular control over what to show or not (comments, shorts, live etc.).

I use containers on Firefox to sandbox YouTube, and then have a throwaway account that’s literally just for YouTube and nothing else. Everywhere else on the web, scripts from Google are blacklisted using uBO.

NewPipe on my phone. I don't have PC I can use rn but when I used to have one I'd just use my browser (mainly Firefox) with ublock origin to watch YouTube (without signing in).

Freetube on desktop works beautifully. They just added playlists too

This is awesome!

on the minus side, it's electron and it doesn't have tabs, but it's a rather minor inconvenience for me

Do your subscriptions load well? I just imported mine from freshrss and they’re loading slowly

A couple seconds does it... I have 56 subscribed channels though, that's not a lot, perhaps loading times scale with this number

Hmm maybe I’ll reinstall. Never loading for me. I can click individual but not all subs

You can check the tracker for open issues, see if you're encountering a known one

grayjay, it's an app developed by Louis Rossman to combine a lot of streaming platforms into one privacy and security respecting app. it does have billionaire backing tho if that yanks your chain

+1 on Grayjay. Also Tubular. FreeTube on PC and SmartTube on TV.

NewPipe or PipePipe.

Been using PipePipe for awhile now and love it. Unfortunately, recently it has not been able to load playlists 9/10 times. Very frustrating. Hopefully it gets a patch soon.

With invidious and in FreshRSS I use the youtube extension to use the embedded video player, you just need update this part of the code https://github.com/FreshRSS/Extensions/blob/master/xExtension-YouTube/extension.php#L153-L163
It easy just to replace for this:

    public function getHtmlContentForLink(FreshRSS_Entry $entry, string $link): string
    {
        $domain = 'www.youtube.com';
        if ($this->useNoCookie) {
            $domain = 'www.youtube-nocookie.com';
        }
        $domain = 'invidious.personal.com';
        $params = 'quality=dash';
        $url = str_replace('//www.youtube.com/watch?v=', '//'.$domain.'/embed/', $link);
        $url = str_replace('http://', 'https://', $url);
        $url = $url . '?' . $params;

        return $this->getHtml($entry, $url);
    }

The only change is to use $domain = 'invidious.personal.com';
And add the parameter quality=dash

Seems there's also this one https://github.com/tunbridgep/freshrss-invidious
but haven't tried it

Grayjay on my Android phone. I like that it supports a lot of different services, and I have subs on Odysee, Rumble, and Nebula (I pay for a sub there). I sometimes download videos for offline use if I'm going to listen on my commute or something (no point in using up data if I don't need to).

On my desktop/laptop, I just use YouTube directly w/ uBlock Origin on Firefox (to block ads) without logging in. I don't watch much YouTube on my desktop/laptop, and when I do, I'll just look for a specific video or whatever.

I also have NewPipe installed on my phone for when I want to find something specific (i.e. background music or something), because Grayjay's search kind of sucks.

Not Foss so if that's something that matters to you I would recommend you look elsewhere

Grayjay is source available, which is better than nothing. I'd prefer FOSS, but the features make up for the poor choice of license.

So is Windows XP

That doesn't mean much

It's really not. Windows XP had its source leaked, it's not source available. Grayjay is source available, so I can see every new commit before it hits my phone. That's a pretty big difference, and it's the most important when it comes to public security audits.

You aren't legally allowed to do anything about a bad commit so it is meaningless

That doesn't follow. If there's a bad commit in Windows 10 or 11, I won't even know about it. If there's a bad commit in Grayjay, I can:

  • not upgrade, or downgrade to an unaffected version
  • report the issue on their issue tracker
  • technically violate the license by patching it myself and building my own copy (probably fine provided I don't distribute changes)

I can do exactly none of that with most proprietary software, so this source-available license is much better than those. Again, it's not ideal, but considering it the same as every other proprietary software license is absurd.

I don't watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.

I use a self-hosted invidious instance, and despite the recent issues with Google trying to block them mine works behind Mullvad VPN.

I use the web app on desktop, and Yattee client on my phone/ipad

I have a locally hosted invidious instance but increasingly I'm finding most of the creators I watch are on Nebula. I just recently discovered that Rifftrax has a presence there.

On Android try NewPipe, but dont expect algorithm recommendations, just the main trending pages. Same for iOS use "unwatched"

I sub to channels and use Youtubes recommendations and new for you to find additional channels etc but I don't watch them I use Metube and a browser plugin and download the videos to a directory. I don't get all the privacy but I also am not giving them much watch data and I can avoid the ads.

yt-dlp Web UI

A nice docker friendly front end to yt-dlp. I use it to watch YouTube on iOS devices where ublock origin is not an option.

I use several of the suggestions above, but also for IOS (iPhone) I use “Firefox Focus” and it clears everything when I close it and I can watch ad free.