I used a public instance of Piped for a while and thought about selfhosting it, but the installation process was incredibly hard, to the point of being obnoxious, and in the end, it didn’t even work. I liked the features I saw on the public instances and would like to revisit it some time. Until there I’m using Viewtube. Installation was a breeze and it looks pretty nice.

Do you have some other YT frontend that we could try, post it here and tell us how easy/difficult it is to run and your opinion about it.

  • MorethanevilEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    Seems a better alternative frontend than invidious. I will check that. Thanks for sharing 🌞

  • Boabab
    3•1 year ago

    I’ve been using yt-dpl + MPV + qutebrowser or ytfzf for a long time, but lately I’ve been using Freetube a lot on my desktop (which can also use MPV as an external player). Subscriptions are saved locally and can be exported in several formats. I occasionally export them, sync them over syncthing to my phone and import it on my yt apps on my phone. On my phone I mainly use Libretube, with NewPipe as a backup.

      • Boabab
        1•1 year ago

        Sounds good, I will check it out! Thanks for sharing!

    • Anarch157aOP
      2•1 year ago

      Those look nice. I don’t need a dedicated desktop client, since I always have Firefox open anyways, but I’ll give Libretube a try on my phone. Bonus, Libretube’s Mastodon account is on the same instance that I use :-)

  • 👁️👄👁️English
    2•1 year ago

    I don’t see the point of having an alternative YouTube front end. I just run uBlock Origin with all the filters enabled. Who cares if Google sees your IP requesting a video, they already have it through various means lol.

    • tal
      2•1 year ago

      I can’t speak as to why other people use their alternatives, but if you use mpv with yt-dlp like the guy above, and which I do – which isn’t really a full replacement for YouTube, just for part of it – then you can use stuff like deblocking, interpolating, deinterlacing filters, hardware decoding, etc. Lets me use my own keybindings to move around and such. Seeking happens instantly, without rebuffering time.

      Also means that your bandwidth isn’t a constraint on the resolution you use, since you aren’t streaming the content as you watch, though also means that you need to wait for the thing to download until you watch it.

      There, one is talking about the difference between streaming and watching a local video, and that mpv is a considerably more-powerful and better-performing video player than YouTube’s client is.

      I generally do it when I run into a long video or a series of videos that I know I’m going to want to probably watch.

      EDIT: It also looks, from this test video, like YouTube’s web client doesn’t have functioning vsync on my system, so I get tearing, whereas mpv does not have that issue. That being said, I’m using a new video card, and it’s possible that there’s a way to eliminate that in-browser, and it’s possible that someone else’s system may not run into that – I’m not using a compositor, which is somewhat unusual these days.

  • @i_lost_my_bagelAEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Rehike. It’s meant to be a re implementation of the older hitchhiker youtube layout that youtube had back between around 2015-2020. It doesn’t do anything for privacy but that’s not the point of it so I don’t mind. I’ve tried things like newpipe and invidious but youtube is around 90 percent of my media consumption so having my history, likes, playlists, and recommendations synced between all my devices is too much for me to give up.

  • macallik
    1•1 year ago

    I’m still using public instances for now. I started w/ Piped but the buffer speed was lacking for most of the instances I used. Switched to Invidious and the buffer speed as amazing, albeit a lot more error messages that Google is blocking an instance temporariliy

  • @gobbling871@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0•1 year ago

    I’ve hosted invidious relatively easy for a while now. Simple UI and just works. If anyone needs my compose and config setup, reply and I’ll post it.

    • fatboy93English
      1•1 year ago

      It would be great if you can post the compose and comfigs!

      Are there any minimum requirements?

      • @gobbling871@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        No minimum requirements. And here you go:

        #version: "3.8"
services:
  invidious:
    image: quay.io/invidious/invidious:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    security_opt:
      - no-new-privileges
    container_name: invidious
    stop_grace_period: 3s
    ports:
      - 127.0.0.1:3000:3000
    environment:
      INVIDIOUS_CONFIG: |
        db:
          dbname: invidious
          user: invidious
          password: superstrongpassword491
          host: postgres
          port: 5432
        check_tables: true
        popular_enabled: true
        login_enabled: false
        statistics_enabled: true
        hsts: true
        hmac_key: *PICK-A-LONG-RANDOM-STRING*
        https_only: true
        external_port: 443
        use_quic: true
        database_url: postgres://invidious:superstrongpassword491@postgres/invidious?auth_methods=md5,scram-sha-256
        force_resolve: ipv4
        domain: *your.domain.com*
    healthcheck:
      test: wget -nv --tries=1 --spider http://127.0.0.1:3000/api/v1/comments/jNQXAC9IVRw || exit 1
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 2
    depends_on:
      - postgres

  postgres:
    image: postgres:15-alpine
    container_name: postgres
    security_opt:
      - no-new-privileges
    restart: always
    # purposefully excluded volumes section
    # the database will reset on recreate
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: invidious
      POSTGRES_USER: invidious
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: superstrongpassword491
    healthcheck:
      test: pg_isready -U invidious -d invidious
      interval: 10s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5