Invidious: Why does it suck so much?

tallwookie@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – -2 points –

I tried to like Invidious, I really did but it's just awful. it's basically painful to use as it is now. I've tried to play around with various combinations of settings and browsers and cant find any combination where the video doesnt either:

  • take a few minutes to launch
  • fail to buffer every 30 seconds or so

sometimes it'll do both or get "stuck" and then wont buffer at all, or skip frames and then the audio is out of sync with the video - it usually gets stuck at that point though. is there some magic trick that folks use to make it at least moderately usable? or is it just vaporware?

as it is, I'm just going to go back to youtube. it works & works really well. the only thing I found useful about invidous was the ability to export the channels I subscribed to as xml/json. there's better downloaders, I just dont see the draw for this utility.

11

I use Linux and mpv to watch the videos. I use 'Open with' firefox extension and configure a shortcut to open links via mpv. That way, I can just right click in the video page >> Open with mpv. Rarely encounter problems this way.

Self-hosting it and it's been working fine for me since April of last year. Are you hosting it yourself, or are you going to a public invidious site?

Invidious is just a frontend to Youtube like Teddit was a frontend for Reddit. It's not federated, and Google can and will do everything in their power to make it suck. Just like how Reddit will now destroy Teddit next month.

Peertube is the federated option for video hosting/sharing. But of course, like everything else currently controlled by the centralized mega-corporations, there is a huge network effect hurdle that users need to overcome to get their content off of the user-hostile megacorporations (Youtube) and onto the federated alternatives (Peertube).

I see invidious/teddit/nitter/quetre/rimgo/scribe/libremdb as stop gap band-aids to temporarily give power back to the users, but in the end the owners of the content have full control over stopping these.

This is why it is so important that we promote federated networks like lemmy, mastadon, matrix, peertube, etc... Otherwise the entire internet will be a user-hostile cesspool.

Adding to this, I only get 720p no matter what I do.