This is the best youtube client, bar none. It keeps local history and "subscriptions" without requiring you to log in to google. I use it on an Amazon Fire Tablet. There seems to be no iOS equivalent, which is one of the things preventing me from upgrading to an iPad.
Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV? I've tried it several times in the past, and its always been wonky there. I use SmartYouTubeTV (https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/) on AndroidTV right now, and the logged out experience is terrible.
> This is the best youtube client, bar none. It keeps local history and "subscriptions" without requiring you to log in to google.
Isn't it funny how one man's feature is another man's bug?
Not supporting logging in with a Google account to keep subscriptions and history synchronized across devices is exactly what disqualifies it from consideration for me, and I suspect I'm not alone here.
For those like me there's YouTube Vanced, which is almost an exact clone of YouTube except without the ads, allows you to disable a bunch of distracting "features" like info cards and watermarks, and with the ability to use MicroG in place of Play Services for the actual logging in with Google feature: https://vanced.app/
Isn't it great that we both have the ability to choose the YouTube replacement app that works best for us despite Google technically "owning" the platform though? This is why I love Android. (EDIT: Re-read this and realized this could be seen as inflammatory. Really did not mean to start a platform war. Just glad that Android is a choice that's available to those who value this kind of thing.)
vanced is just the normal youtube app with just some modifications to block ads and background playback. It is closed sourced, not to mention, and uses a modified version of MicroG that works in unknown ways to access/sync with the google account, which is very different to the original MicroG (which has been developed to replace Google Services from your phone to minimize google tracking your activities.) . If you don't want unknown apps get access to your google account or if you care about your privacy/security, don't use Vanced, stick with NewPipe.
But I agree that if you have sensitive data on your google account you should make a value judgement yourself on if the extra convenience/features on Vanced is worth the risk over NewPipe.
I personally use a different mail provider so I don't have much sensitive information on my Google account, basically just using it for YouTube and Play Store.
More specifically stick to v14.21.54 of Vanced since otherwise you can see some ads now. I had updated to the latest one and started seeing ads below the video playing and when I am at the home page of my account.
I prefer to use Vanced over the NewPipe. New Pipe somehow not always works properly and searching for videos is also not perfect.
But.
NewPipe allows downloading the videos which is great. Sharing video function in Vanced allows using NewPipe for download directly from Vanced application.
Many people are trying to move away from Google and Youtube, the cross-device and cross-network tracking which this allows being deemed detrimental by more and more people.
There is also Bitchute and Hooktube, if you want to get at Youtube videos without using Google more than absolutely necessary.
Cast from a local PC on the network. View from a browser with uBlock Origin. I forget that YouTube even has ads most of the time. Using another person's device is always a painful awakening.
Chromecast uses Google DNS servers ignoring your DHCP DNS. You need to block Google DNS servers on your router so then the Chromecast will switch to your DHCP DNS.
Also, on my experience, some Youtube ads are served through the same domain that serves the video so you won't be completely ad free.
> Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV?
Yes I use newpipe on a Nvidia shield as my primary youtube client. There are at least 3 of us who open tickets as issues come up for Android TV.
It's not the most polished experience, but as of 0.19.5 it's functional. It rarely pulls videos above 1080p quality for some reason, but if I have to choose between 4k content on the youtube client and 1080p with my privacy, and without advertisements that's an easy choice for me to make.
Interesting. I installed it, and I have no problem getting 4K videos. Playback seems fine.
I can't figure out how to make it do a 10s skip forward / backward that you do on phone/tablet by tapping on the left or right side of the screen. I tried all the buttons on the shield's game controller after not being able to skip on my remote. I can change the focus to the timeline, and skip that way, but its not as nice as a 10s skip.
I've had it on my phone for some time, but 75% of the time it fails to play the video, complaining that it failed to parse the video page, or something similar. With youtube-dl, you have to keep it updated for it to not crash with similar errors, so might be a question of updates not being regular enough (I use F-Droid to update it).
Also, suggestion capabilities of Youtube are very high. I'll always be coming back for that until there is an alternative. Unfortunately, that also means that using non-official players is counterproductive (I want to feed the recommendation engine).
I would quibble with that. It's really all or nothing. Youtube changes something, NewPipe breaks entirely. Then NewPipe is updated, and it works perfectly again.
I like NewPipe, but in practice this means you just have to accept that there will be stretches, a few days or a week long, where it just doesn't work at all.
I know what you're talking about since I have experienced it before, but I have not encountered the problem often in the past year or so. Perhaps you were just using it during a dry spell from the NewPipe developers or F-Droid. A number of useful features have been added during the past year, such as the ability to view live streams. A few quirks also exist, such as feeds displaying videos that are posted in the future.
As for the recommendation engine, I prefer gaming it. NewPipe is wonderful because it does not feed it. I have a special profiles setup on my desktop for when I want to feed it. This approach works wonderfully for discovering new channels, allows for multiple profiles to get recommendations for different viewing interests, avoids polluting recommendations based upon a single odd-ball view, and allows finer grained control over the information that I feed Google.
I was experiencing it. Then I realised f-droid just hadn't updated in a while - no doubt it's that Google battery saver feature where the programs I want my phone to run to achieve some background task get banned.
Since updating manually (in f-droid) i have been a happy camper.
F-droid sometimes lags a couple days behind the latest updates. Usually the parsing errors are fixed within a day or two and made available on the official site before f-droid. As far as I know, those are usually caused by updates to youtube itself.
Yeah honestly as far as app repositories go, f-droid's usually pretty good at keeping things up to date. I use it for most apps I can get off there, newpipe's about the only one I bother grabbing straight from the site because I get impatient.
You need to install from the github repository. Youtube changes interface every once in a while, this is really isnt any app's fault, but youtube's. Same thing happens to youtube-dl all the time.
If you want to run your own Fdroid repository, it's quite simple to automate for releases from GitHub/gitlab apis. There's probably some way to automate it completely with GitHub actions even (I've been too lazy to learn to do it properly, so everything I do is just through local scripting on my computer, with netlify signing Fdroid releases for me).
Due to Fdroid being so slow at updating indexes on my older devices, I actually use a secondary Fdroid client (nethunter client also has a privileged extension) for manual updates, which only has my personal repos enabled.
same experience when i was on android (around v7) and f-droid.
it basically crashed/failed every time. i use ytdl quite a lot and updating it once every few months is sufficient ...
I've been using NewPipe for years, and find it to be an example of how an app should be. Besides that it doesn't force you to log in to keep things like subscriptions, one of the best things about it is that it's very snappy, whereas the YouTube app is like every other Google app in that it's slow and not very responsive. Being able to play audio in the background is the killer feature for me.
> There seems to be no iOS equivalent, which is one of the things preventing me from upgrading to an iPad.
I use an iPhone 6 and have refused to upgrade iOS to the latest version, so there are quite a few apps that don't work on my phone anymore (when launched, they show a message saying I need to get the latest version of the app, but then I can't get it because it's not available for my version of iOS), one of those apps is YouTube, so I'm limited to accessing it through the browser. It would be great to have a good alternative.
If you have installed the app before, you should be able to open the App Store, and go to your past purchases. If you find the app in there, then it should download the last compatible version.
I have used that to load old apps onto an iPad that I can't update.
You can also upload IPA files to your iPhone using older versions of iTunes that supports sideloading saved (but purchased) IPA files. Apple now offers downloads for these older versions of iTunes, see here: https://support.apple.com/downloads/itunes
Yes, the app downloads, but then the message still shows up. It's not a phone/os problem, it's the app makers forcing users to only use the latest version.
I don't know about op, but when I was using iOS, I developed a firm "only one major OS upgrade allowed" rule after two of my devices were effectively hobbled / near-bricked by iOS upgrades 2+ major versions after the store-bought version.
It works well for me on Android TV with Nvidia Shield. At one point I noticed after a Newpipe upgrade I couldn't get the cursor to go down to the list of videos. So I downgraded for a couple of weeks. Then when the next version came out I tried it and it was fine again.
One weird thing I noticed was that I used to be able to get a mouse style cursor with the right stick, but that stopped working at some point. Not sure if the change was NewPipe or OS level, but it's still manageable.
If you have USB ports you can always try other types of inputs. Aside from plain keyboard/mouse, there are a bunch of interesting options these days.
I have a shield, and I generally just use the TV remote controlling the shield via HDMI CEC. Maybe that's why it doesn't work well for me. I'll have to try it again.
Shield user here, as of 0.19.5 most things work via a Logitech harmony, so I assume most remotes work at this point. The pause / unpause buttons sometimes result in the UI getting into a weird state.
Yeah that could be it. I use the gamepad or sometimes an air mouse. Both work fine. My only gripe is Nvidia doesn't let you put side loaded apps on the homescreen.
It would be nice if you could sort subscriptions by date. Last time I used it, this wasn't possible, making the entire subscription functionality useless.
I hope the developers are here. I'm so grateful for this app and especially the support : Everytime YouTube obfuscates their API to take them down, they quickly publish an updated app that works.
I hope you realize that apps like these kill the ecosystem for content creators who are paid based on ads. If you don't like YT ads, pay for the premium version. But suggesting that this app is great is not right. Anyways, I trust if this becomes big, YT will kill them anyways.
YT API requires keys and they know exactly what is going on here and can shut it down in a heartbeat if they want to. This is exactly what happened to apps built on top of Twitter APIs back in the day.
If I want to support a content creator, I do so by donating to them directly, not by allowing a massive and (in my personal opinion) evil company to profit both of my and their backs. Not to mention that both seeing ads and using the official YouTube app is quite unpleasant.
I am very grateful to the developers of NewPipe for providing me with a painless way to experience the content produced by creators that I like, and which also respects my freedoms and my privacy. It is unfortunate that YouTube has an effective monopoly on its market, and that a lot of the content is not available elsewhere -- I'd much rather watch content served by a platform which respects its users, but unfortunately that is not really possible today. So in the meanwhile, I am happy that I don't have to support a nasty company with a nasty business model.
Honest and serious question, if Youtube were to shut down tomorrow, do people think that whatever alternative (or even better, competing alternatives) would have a different model?
I'm curious to know what exactly would you do differently if you were to make a replacement for Youtube.
I believe, based on conversations I've had, that the target audience of NewPipe overlaps with the target audience of solutions such as PeerTube, Mastodon, and other FOSS, privacy-centric alternatives.
PeerTube is not a company, it's an open source implementation of a peer-to-peer video sharing platform. Any person or company that wants to can pick it up and build a commercial platform on top of it. Whether that includes advertising or not is up to them.
Sure, but my point is that this doesn't answer my question. I wasn't asking which technology would the next company use. If Youtube used P2P, it still wouldn't solve many of the issue people have with Youtube.
The assumption is: yes, the content creators who host their videos via P2P solutions like PeerTube would have to rely on external sources such as Patreon, or in-video sponsorships, or as another user pointed, use the built-in donations feature.
> If Youtube used P2P, it still wouldn't solve many of the issue people have with Youtube.
What issues in particular are you talking about and how would P2P fail to resolve them?
You dodged my question, but I could try to answer yours.
Firstly, no one in this comment thread has claimed that PeerTube can solve all of the issues of YouTube. Privacy-oriented folk, and some FOSS advocates see it as a potential solution. Further, I do not personally use PeerTube, but I do use Mastodon and have read about PeerTube in passing.
Another major component of PeerTube aside from the P2P video is the decentralization aspect powered by ActivityPub, which is also used by Mastodon. So not only are the videos decentralized themselves, but so is the service; you can joined one PeerTube instance, and view videos that other instances can also view. If you grow unhappy with the administration of your current instance (maybe they added ads to the page, or maybe they are privacy-invading), you can simply move to another but still have access to the same videos.
In addition, since the videos are P2P, this reduces the server loads on each respective instance and thus lowers the baseline cost of having to host every video uploaded. This could reduce the need for ad revenue to keep the servers running.
It would solve all of them, because people would control their own video. Unless you're defining the "problem" Youtube solves as "Google gets revenue and then shares it back to some degree."
If Pewdiepie switched to Peertube, that would be a problem for Google. But probably not for Felix.
You don't have to look very far. This very thread is about an "ad-free, open-source Android YouTube client". How would P2P change anything about ads being shown?
Yes. Before youtube we just sent each other video files directly, posted them on our own websites, or found them with p2p software, all of which worked fine. Web services are traps promising ease of use, while actually aiming for lock in based on network effects. That so many people think the centralized third party hosting and bundled viewing software are critical to the general functionality just goes to show how insidious they've become.
So much of what you write is true, yet ignores a vital value that the centralised websites do provide: discoverability. Not only does YouTube provide (sub-mediocre) search over all the [mb]illions of videos it hosts, it also is a hub: if I'm looking for a particular video/clip ("Leyla's Beans Advert from Futurama") the hub is the first place I'm going to search. These are really hard problems in usability that we need to solve to make a p2p/fediweb viable and attractive to use.
For sure, and discoverability/aggregation is critical if Free solutions are to gain mindshare while competing with proprietary ones. I was just responding to what would replace Youtube if it went away due to lack of surveillance revenue, pointing out that we've had workable video sharing long before Youtube.
Not who you asked and I’m not up to date when it comes to the world of video streaming but personally I’d prefer a web where content creators would have to pay to distribute their content. Pay as in have some server, domain, bandwidth and whatnot. It’s then up to the creator to decide how/if to monetize their content. Just like the old days.
In addition to vimeo as a sibling commenter mentioned, there are probably at least a dozen services offering video hosting catering to all sizes of customers.
> It’s then up to the creator to decide how/if to monetize their content.
And this is why the creators gravitate to youtube. The real tangible service google provides is an automated ad sales rep. That's not an easy job, roughly 0% of creators would succeed at this on their own.
> Just like the old days.
My guess is that this still exists and never even stopped growing. It's just that youtube grew so much faster that it's easy to miss. Again, because youtube is most creators' only good chance at monetization (not that its their only option for hosting).
We would not have any of the creators we had today. You're gatekeeping not only in the developed world but also in the developing world. A slew of people would be discouraged to even start given that they don't have money for bandwidth, servers, domains. Such a parochial, insulated view.
> If I want to support a content creator, I do so by donating to them directly, not by allowing a massive and (in my personal opinion) evil company to profit both of my and their backs. Not to mention that both seeing ads and using the official YouTube app is quite unpleasant.
There is a big problem in your model. But before that let me address the reason why the current model is better. You are right that the intermediary company is profiting out of your and content creator's backs. That is true. But that is not the complete picture. The company is also paying for hosting the content. In essence, the money that advertisers pay is split in the following way:
1. Content Creator
2. Content hosting
3. Company gets the remaining chunk
Now here is why the current model is better: you can watch all videos on Youtube for free. Discovery is an essential part of how Content Creators are discovered. Now if you put all these Content Creators behind a paywall how are you going to decide if the Creator is worth supporting or not? And even if the Content is good, is s/he going to stick around for long? How many can you support? 10? 100? 1000? There is a limit isn't it? And what happens if the Content Creator stops releasing more content? Eventually subscribers will unsubscribe (stop payments). Then what happens to the Content? Will it remain hosted? Who is going to pay for the cost of hosting content that no one is watching? You won't be able to pay more than X$ amount because you feel that is what the Content Creator is worth to you. An advertiser is different. An advertiser is driven by motive of making profits. If s/he finds that advertising with a particular Content Creator is lucrative s/he spends way more than X$ that you contribute. In essence, the advertiser values the Content Creator more than you will ever be able to. Because you are consuming content from the creator - that is where your link with the creator ends. The ad agencies are making profits from the creator. That is the big difference! You are not motivated to pay more and more to the creator right? Advertisers are! And that will only continue to increase the more quality content the Creator puts out. And even if the Creator decides to take a break, advertisers will still continue to pay for a spot in his/her content as long as people are watching it (which they have discovered because Youtube is free). Would you pay for a Creator if s/he takes a break for 6 months to a year?
Advertising right now monetizes even 10 year old videos. However irrelevant that video might be for today's scenario you still have people watching extremely old videos and advertisements running on it with the Creator getting passive income. So even though a Content Creator might get a lesser chunk of the overall payment in the short term s/he would recover everything and a lot more over the longer term. But if s/he starts taking payment for Content then it will only continue until s/he is posting content. Once that is stopped people will leave the creator in droves. Then that content becomes a deadweight! The platform will never allow content to just sit around stale with no one paying for it. The platform will have no choice but to remove it.
All this is a reasoned argument - but advertising really sucks, it’s either overtly irritating you or covertly brainwashing you with visuals and voices you would never naturally care to see.
Plus, the democratised ad platforms have led to random scummy people running their disgusting scams on forex trading or get rich quick schemes, or tech products that don’t work etc. being able to get in my face while I’m at home relaxing. I’d want to see that problem fixed.
Example: I love Apple products, I’ve watched dozens of hours of Apple product reviews - and I often like what I see, and end up buying. But I still “Skip ad” on Apple ads - because ad content really sucks!
So as a modern civilisation we must find a way to sell products better than the current state of the art in the ad industry.
I agree with all your points. I would prefer more control over what ads are shown rather than blanket ad ban. There is no alternative way for companies to reach customers. Supporting Content Creators is not the same though. It just benefits two people in the equation: Content Creator and Consumer. This is not viable longer term as it depends on the Consumer being able to pay for the content offered by the Creator! And how does the Consumer make money? Through either a job or having his/her own enterprise.
I am assuming you work at a company or have startup of your own. Either ways your company would never get orders without some form of advertising. I know it sucks but that is the only way to reach potential clients. Banning advertising will end up having a major cascading effect where companies that rely on advertising (nearly every company does) would get shut down leading to huge unemployment. I rather ads be regulated than banned completely!
Companies dont have a God given right to exist, nor to intrude upon me with ads, targeted or not, nor are they entitled to my attention. I could not possibly care less what the company wants.
The only effect banning advertising will have is that businesses will have to find another way to attract customers.
As for companies not existing without advertising are you serious? Billboards or some other passive advertising could still be possible,or how about we all opt in to services we want to hear about.
Companies have existed before modern advertising and will exist after.
> Companies dont have a God given right to exist, nor to intrude upon me with ads, targeted or not, nor are they entitled to my attention. I could not possibly care less what the company wants.
Good for you. Use an ad blocker.
> The only effect banning advertising will have is that businesses will have to find another way to attract customers.
There is no better way in the 21st century than online advertising. Nothing even comes close. You want to remove online advertising, you will have to remove 80% of the companies that exist today as well causing huge unemployment.
> As for companies not existing without advertising are you serious? Billboards or some other passive advertising could still be possible,or how about we all opt in to services we want to hear about.
You possibly can't be serious. Do you know how much it costs to run an ad on a billboard? It is the second most expensive form of advertisement after TV ads! Technology has enabled us to reach people in better ways. If you want to revert back to ancient ways of advertising why not go all the way back to stone age where there was no form of advertising and everything was done through barter system?
> Companies have existed before modern advertising and will exist after.
Yes they have. But there were no trillion dollar valued companies pre-modern advertising. That is also a fact! You want to go back to printing ads in newspapers, using billboards and TV/radio ads? Not all companies can afford it. Majority of the advertisers (in terms of numbers and not revenue) are small mom and pop shops and startups. They do not have the capital to invest in these avenues. What you are suggesting is regression not progress!
If we all did, there won't be any small companies or startups. The only ones that will survive will be the big guys who will scoop up small players as much as possible. You will be rendered jobless along with many of your colleagues. Whether you like it or hate it, every single company today depends completely on online advertising for reaching customers/clients. I am not saying it is perfect. But there is no alternative which is as ubiquitous as online advertising! Every other form of advertising shuts out the smaller player from ever being able to compete. You can start online advertising with as little as 10$. Which other medium gives you that ability? For a cash-strapped startup this is a lifeline!
Except, newpipe doesn't use the YouTube API. Similar to youtube-dl, it scrapes the YouTube webpage for all its functionality. The only way I can imagine YouTube can shut this down is by introducing DRM, at which point I hope people will boycott them anyway.
If YouTube's own app wasn't so bad, I wouldn't have searched for an alternative.
Plus like 90% of YouTube channels I'm following mirror their content to their own subscription service (https://watchnebula.com/), and I'm happily paying for that instead of paying for YouTube Premium.
People already use ad blockers on YouTube which have a similar effect, so this isn't a unique "problem" to NewPipe. I also directly financially support creators whose content I enjoy and most large creators these days have advertisements embedded in their videos, as well as asking for support through means other than AdSense.
But more importantly, the main reason I use NewPipe is because it has basic features that the official YouTube app doesn't provide -- playing videos in an overlay and in the background (so you can lock your screen and continue playing the video). You can get this incredibly basic feature if you pay for YouTube Red, which seems to indicate the only reason this feature isn't provided for the free version is spite. And that is the benefit of free software.
> You can get this incredibly basic feature if you pay for YouTube Red, which seems to indicate the only reason this feature isn't provided for the free version is spite.
It's because YouTube's music agreements prohibit it on mobile platforms to prevent it competing with Spotify et al.
Can you cite any content creator who actually stated that they are making significant money from Youtube ads (AdSense)? It seems that all the content creators that I follow keep repeating that they make money trough sponsored videos, organic/direct ads, brand partnerships and even affiliate links, while on the other hand YouTube ads are basically a negligible share of their income. Here’s one example, I can find more if needed https://youtu.be/v8F4jrtZtNE
Quite a passive aggressive reply. I'll donate to creators and support them directly if I wish. Not running ads on my system is my personal decision and suggesting otherwise is not a great argument. Whoever wrote this comment also mentions YT APIs coming into play here, which further takes away any air of authenticity the author had to begin with.
It's not the job of end users to support and maintain the ecosystem. If YouTube wanted to protect their services with authentication, they are very capable of doing so. It's not the end users fault, even a tiny bit.
YouTube is a corporate for-profit walled garden platform. Corporate entities put massive effort into designing complex and subtle policies for these platforms in order to drive first and second order effects that sustain them and extract value from them. It is absolutely not the job of random user to spend any effort figuring out whether their actions are in support of the particular platform policies. In fact I'd go so far as to say that YouTube is monopolistic and unethical and users should do everything they can to subvert it.
I'll grant you the second point but RE: ads, it's my understanding that ad rates are so low on YT that content creators have to resort to product placements in addition to pre-roll ads.
(For the record, I pay for YouTune Premium which directly contributes to content creators on YT).
Virtually every content creator who depends on the content for their livelyhood has figured out some other way to monetize it (Patreon, Floatplane, Twitch, merch, etc). I use NewPipe and a PiHole so I practically never see YouTube ads, but I always make sure I'm paying the creators I watch regularly somehow.
Of course, I don't even use NewPipe for its lack of ads. If Google improved their own app, maybe I'd go back to it.
Bad analogy. WINE doesn't use Microsoft's services to run, and it doesn't cause the application to run in a different manner than intended; NewPipe connects to Google's servers to fetch video, and unlike the way Google intends, it doesn't show the other content in the page (ads, etc).
NewPipe uses Google resources; WINE itself only uses resources on your personal computer.
I would hope we can find a way for apps like this to exist while still paying youtube and content creators. Something like and API subscription for a third party algorithm tool like this that pay youtube part of the subscription.
Probably my favourite part about Newpipe is the option to skip silences. If you're watching/listening to a speech-only video, it (at least feels) like such an improvement.
I absolutely love newpipe, and use it exclusively over the youtube app on android.
On a similar note - I also have found invidious [1] to be so much better than the normal youtube web frontend, and use it almost exclusively for my desktop youtube usage. It might be an unfair comparison because I am not a google user and the youtube website is terrible for non-logged-in users, but for us it is an absolute godsend. I am not sure how it works as far as views and add revenue and all that, and certainly the ability to thumbs-up and comment is disabled unless you click through to the youube link and log in, but I generally try to support the channels I follow through other means so I do not feel too bad about it.
I don't think ViewPure counts as a YouTube client. It just embeds a YouTube video, which is enough to strip away the YouTube clutter, but it's not reimplementing the YouTube player's JavaScript code the way invidio.us does, for instance.
I could be mistaken but I don't think YouTube officially permits third-party clients of any sort. Perhaps that's a good litmus test.
I both pay for yt premium and use newpipe on older (degoogled) devices where using latest youtube.apk is not an option anymore. Also, where I live yt premium is a fraction of the cost of many developed countries, cheap for me but not for many in this country. In some countries yt premium is not even available.
I read a lot 'entitled' opinions in this thread pretending that the whole world should ignore their circumstances and just do whatever works for them (ie. Pay for yt premium). The internet is global: why would you think that using open source software to access bits off of global internet is unethical/illegitimate?
> why would you think that using open source software to access bits off of global internet is unethical/illegitimate?
"It's just bits." That's a slippery slope.
One might argue that circumventing the intended purpose of a platform in this way uses technological advantage to take advantage of content creators who are vulnerable.
The kid who takes all the candy from the "Please take one." jack-o-lantern on Halloween is only taking a bit of atoms from their neighbor's porch.
Now let me get off my high horse and turn my ad blocker back on.
I just spent a few hours at an elderly relative's house checking over her computer.
She had her screen lock and a message on Chrome saying that she needed to "Call Microsoft" and she wasn't able to close the window, etc. So she called and "John Henderson" was able to talk her into installing LogMeIn. He then started about charging her $149 and she came to her senses and called me.
I'm 99% sure that she was served some Javascript via an ad network.
I installed uBlock Origin on both of her browsers. I tried changing her DNS to Adguard but it turns out that Comcast hasn't let people change DNS on their routers for many years. Even if you change it on your personal device, they'll force DNS on you.
I have been debating putting ad-blocking on their computer because I've worried about something like this happening. I'd also worried about some site not functioning properly because of ads being blocked. But we'll deal with that if and when.
Sorry but not sorry to sites that are doing 3rd party ad networks that they don't audit.
But it's not really a slippery slope anymore: the world has gone down that slippery slope since the web has been created and operated and it's been great for everyone so far.
Overall, the benefits of the "free bits" have enabled anyone to be a creator and create a audience for free, has enabled companies to become global in an instant reach potentially everyone with access to TCP/IP and DNS servers. But creators and operators are trying to shoehorn the global world into a handful of brands (YouTube, ig, fb...) and a handful of business models.
If you were content creators before this age you had to suck it up to several layers of middle men, to get your content on tv, on cinema, on a CD. Now, the free bits lets you operate single handly from your bedroom. But is has a cost: you rely on gatekeepers to distribute your content and track your audience in the name of ad optimization and those users who they are trying to track - who are sovereign over their devices and software - can and will decide how they engage with the bits that reach their hardware and software.
There are alternatives: aol used to operate a walled garden. Many countries try to operate their own walled gardens. I'm not making a judgment call, I know where I prefer to spend my time on. But people do have to climb down their high horses pretending the power dynamic on the open web is only favouring consumers and users
> One might argue that circumventing the intended purpose of a platform in this way uses technological advantage to take advantage of content creators who are vulnerable.
Youtube does not even run on a standard Android anymore (without Google proprietary bits) so that's not like some people have a choice anyways.
If you want to use Youtube on a standard Android, you either have to use a modded version of Youtube or a third-party app. I'd argue that modifying manually the official version sounds worse.
> I read a lot 'entitled' opinions in this thread pretending that the whole world should ignore their circumstances
Come on, how many of the HN users bragging in this thread about blocking YT ads are in a similar situation? I'm glad you've come up with a convincing justification for your behavior, but you've built a mighty strawman there, no one is arguing that people who cannot afford a modern smartphone are the problem.
The convincing justification is only one part of the argument.
The other part is about freedom to challenge contemporary adtech and digital business models.. ie. Compute on my terms.
Content creators and YouTubers are welcome to not serve me their content if I don't accept their trackers.
It's not only about affording a modern smartphone: all these digital behemoths rely on us keeping up to date to their tech standards, chasing the latest phone, the latest firmware.
Software like newpipe lets us engage on our own terms.
Sometimes I think of the freedom to challenge contemporary restaurant business models too.. you know, food on my terms. Restaurants are welcome not to serve me their food if I don't accept their bill, but I won't tell them upfront just like you.
Let's not pretend this is about high-minded freedom; like everyone else in a free market, you're free to not consume the fruits of labor from content creators and YouTube.
At least in your previous comment, I thought it was honest and interesting to raise the issue of self-interested piracy for low-income users. For all your talk of entitlement, how disappointing it is for you to end with "but I'm entitled to their work because I don't like their terms".
> Restaurants are welcome not to serve me their food if I don't accept their bill, but I won't tell them upfront just like you.
What's the restaurant equivalent to me having to turn on JavaScript or disable my ad blocker?
> thought it was honest and interesting to raise the issue of self-interested piracy for low-income users.
Well, I touched you on that point (inequality). But it seems that I failed to touch you on the fact that digital users are entitled to run whatever they want on their computer.
Creators have the right to set terms on the fruits of their labor. Your rights end where their rights begin. A restaurant's terms is their fee, YouTube and creators' terms are ads or Premium.
I don't know why some people think they can just make up the right to do whatever they want with other people's work. You can do what you want on your computer, but not with their stuff. Easy solution: don't use YouTube, but apparently you think you're entitled to it.
I am entitled not due to a sense of self entitlement, but because that's how the protocol for engagement on the web defines it: that's how tcp/ip works. I type in a url and my computer takes whatever bits the server sends my way.
Platforms and creators have pletora of other protocols to use that suit the model you're suggesting.
We're not entitled to do everything we're capable of doing. I'm capable of cheating and stealing, the protocol of physics allows me to do so. I'm also capable of trespassing, a fence or door lock doesn't really stop me. My fellow citizens have a plethora of other protections like electric barbed wire fence and reinforced titanium locks or armed guards to suit the model of entry that they want.
But the model of entry is not my right to decide. I do not freely infringe on others' rights because my tools allow me to do so. I do not infringe of others' rights because other people have a plethora of alternative rights to choose from.
Content creators and YouTube have agreed to a set of (legal) terms of entry, as is their right: watch ads or pay for Premium. It is not your right to deny them simply because you are capable of it.
The bill is the ads which they enforce to the best of their ability, the analogy doesn't have to be literal. Google also offers a literal charge, in the form of YouTube Premium.
You can pretend that's the case, I won't. The only rights a company has towards its customers are to provide its services, charge money, and shut up otherwise. Demanding its customers to harm themselves is none of these things.
I read a lot of people's experiences here in the thread and I think a lot of you really should give YouTube Premium a try. It solves most of the problems you are describing, while also paying the creators
This.
If your problem are ads, background-playing and download - then just go with premium.
I do understand that some apps provide extra features etc. but premium removes ads cross-platform... and since GoogleMusic is included, it replaces Spotify as well(yes, it's different..).
I think this app caters to a different set of needs. Personally I find the official YouTube app noisy and pushy and offensive. Autoplay and PIP are anti-features I want to avoid. Recommendations are also unwanted.
This alternative looks great to me, on paper at least. I'll give it a go.
Autoplay and PIP can be turned off in settings. PIP is one of the reasons I got premium initially but the ad free experience on all devices is what made me stay.
Defaults matter. I have a lot of devices and I can't be bothered to make every app less awful on every one of them every few months. It's far easier to opt out of the app entirely.
It's likely that most uses actually enjoy autoplay and PIP (I certainly do).
You're saying that you don't pay for Premium and use an unofficial client that does not pay content creators just because it's too much of a hassle to change the two settings that bother you.
>YouTube is a closed platform (server-side), so I personally don't see much moral use of using a libre client.
I agree that this is an issue, but I'm not that much of a purist. As long as I'm not actively supporting a non-libre service I don't necessarily mind using it if I can do so in a way that does not completely disrespect my own privacy.
>To what extent does the cost of YouTube Premium pay for the client versus the creators?
That's a good question, which I would really like to know the answer to. In principle, if YouTube offered a libre client like Newpipe but with a payment model like YouTube Red, and if I knew that a majority of the money went to content creators, I would love that and very happily pay for it. I would be very reluctant to use a non-libre client (like Youtube's own), however - I prefer the browser, even with ads, in that case.
> YouTube is a closed platform (server-side), so I personally don't see much moral use of using a libre client.
How come? If someone sends me an email to my FOSS server, which I open with my FOSS client, I don't care if the server they used to send me is FOSS or not. If YouTube is just sending me data (not running their code on my machines), why should I care what they run?
In any case, to use YouTube Premium you have to login, and therefore have all your viewings tracked. Being able to have subscriptions, etc while avoiding having to login is one of the great features of NewPipe.
Who knows what Google does with the data? Maybe they still keep the history, but attached to an 'anonymous' ID, or they don't keep history but first analyse and infer new data and store that with your profile. Or they provide the data to a 3rd-party instead. Or ...
With GDPR and other new privacy laws, consent to collect data is required.
If you stop watch history, that must mean no watch history is collected.
Is your hypothesis that a large company would consider violating important privacy laws for minimal gain (very slightly improved ad tracking)? It's possible but unlikely.
> Is your hypothesis that a large company would consider violating important privacy laws for minimal gain (very slightly improved ad tracking)? It's possible but unlikely.
It's not really a hypothesis at this point. I've seen first hand plenty of companies that treat fines and lawsuits as a cost of doing business. If the expected profit is higher than expected fines, full speed ahead. GDPR does have large potential fines, but for all I know the math could still work out.
Not only that, but they have enough information on user locations that it might be worth it to segment it out. Take every jurisdiction a given user might be connected to, use the most restrictive overlap of laws, and track each user as much as legally possible. Most users are not under GDPR or similar, and if you miss one here or there you take it out of the fine budget.
Similarly, I cannot log into my YouTube account on some devices. I can log in to my Google account, but it doesn't have the same subscriptions, likes, watch history, etc. On other devices, if I log in with my Google account it logs into my YouYube account, which has what I need. The two accounts must have been synced at some point, but I can't always access the original YT account, which sucks.
The last 3 years I've been very happy with "YouTube Vanced", in particular because of: background play, native adblocking, fully native logged in experience if desired, AND it switches to audio only encode if background play is enabled so it saves data.
NewPipe also has background play that only uses the audio feed. I thought I would miss the logged in experience but if you take a few minutes to subscribe through the app, the UX is actually better or at least on par with the native youtube app.
This remains a killer app for me on Android. I don't know if anything equivalent exists on iOS, to enable background playing and video downloads (and you can choose whether to download them as audio files).
Musi does work well for playing music in the background on iOS.
A downside to Musi is that after playing a video a full screen ad will often pop up in a way that feels invasive and can be difficult to avoid inadvertently clicking. The behavior feels like malware, which leaves me concerned that the developers behind the app might hold flexible ethics and engage in practices such as covertly monetizing user data.
I'm not sure that Apple would ban it. Do they really care if people bypass YouTube's intended restrictions? Obviously Google cares, so you won't be seeing NewPipe on the Play Store.
With iOS Safari you can change the YouTube website setting to always request the desktop site. Then if you press the home button while a video is playing, pull up control center within 5 seconds and press play you have background playback.
There is also a ton of ad blockers for Safari which block YouTube ads.
Nit: Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Is this an attempt to mimic how you speak aloud?
>Consider the Official YouTube app, with a paid YouTube Premium subscription.
That is definitely an option, but people who use things like youtube-dl or apps like NewPipe probably aren't in the target audience for YouTube Premium.
>Videos with still images (many songs) shouldn't be much data at all over the audio alone.
Part of the point is if you never intend to watch the content, but only want to listen to it, there's no point to having video.
That was my assumption. Things like "um" and "uh" tend to be silence-fillers, among other things (see below). It's weird to see them being typed-out, and I've noted an uptick in how often I see it being done.
> I've noted an uptick in how often I see it being done
Yep.
There's something about internet culture that rots our ability to have conversations with others. It's something I've also noticed in myself (it's easy to complain about everyone else) as someone who, sheepishly, has snuck in a juvenile "Um..." when I think I've really got'em good.
I suspect the uptick in just this sort of rot going mainstream. Like instead of bringing your in-person social skills online when the internet was newer, and then becoming corrupted over time, people are just born into the rot from a young age.
And frankly it takes eternal vigilance to stay a noncombative and fair online.
> Is this an attempt to mimic how you speak aloud?
Of course.
> ...probably aren't in the target audience for YouTube Premium.
True. It's unclear if OP fits that description though. Re-read OP's comment.
> ...there's no point to having video.
Agreed. I think it most cases, there is no video for still image YouTube content. Just, you know, a still image. I don't know the extent this is true, nor do I know OP's use case. Assuming that OP is interested in music, the video component shouldn't be a real issue.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6007071?hl=en
i was once told vision impared people can do much faster than that if it's a flat computerised voice. so i started reading articles like that for a while. i had to do a bunch of manual/automatic handling, but i got it up to super fast speeds and i could read it thrice in less than the time it took to read it once. not bad!
I don't know what all NewPipe or Vanced can do, and I don't know what all YouTube's apps can do. I mostly indicated that OP's desired features were covered by the official app (without possibly downloading the audio track from a video file). I'm certainly not making an argument that NewPipe is any better or worse.
You mean "expose the user to emotional manipulation through ads. That is not a feature, unless it's opt-in. A donation button or something like that would be.
You opt-in when you decide you want to consume content made with effort by the creator and hosted with effort by youtube. In a lot of countries, you have an option to opt out of "emotional manupulation through ads" by subscribing to youtube premium.
The app is great, but wasn't google recently banning user accounts for it? Youtube account and google account is same thing, so this app is useful only for othwerwise ungoogled users
It directs you to a link on YouTube where you can download your subscriptions (in XML I believe), and then it allows you to import that file. Pretty neat workaround.
Afaik it was 1 person claiming it, with no screenshots if the emails he claimed he got (although if he did lose access to his GMail, it'd be hard to see the emails).
Besides, does Google/YT even specify the reason for bans? Don't they just write something vague?
I don't think that NewPipe even allows logging in... I think it is an alternative to that because it allows one to subscribe to channels without an account.
What he probably meant is that people who are logged into the Google Services with their google account got im trouble for using NewPipe, which to me seems unlikely. I doubt that Google got away with something like that!
Yeah, I'm confused about what people even talking about with logins. That's not a thing. There's no option to login with Google/Youtube on Newpipe, and that's by design. The value proposition, in addition to being a wonderfully designed, lightweight app, is the ability to subscribe, follow channels, view, download video without any Google/Youtube connection.
I wasn't aware of that at the time. Having used it a bit now, some of the choices do baffle me. It has such wonderfully granular control over bitrate and background behavior, but no option to play the videos you tap on without having to hit a separate "play" button after the video is open? Very odd.
How about playlists and history, though? Personally I don't use subscriptions, and have no use for them.
I suppose and app like this could provide a third party (self host able api) account service - recording history and managing/syncing playlists? Maybe with an option to merge in entries from Google account playlists from time to time?
Playlists are nice not just for playing/listening, but also downloading for offline use/backup/archive.
Ed: i see that it has local history and playlists, with option to export data - but apparently no option to load data (whether from youtube/Google or an earlier export).
YouTube once stopped working for me while I was logged in, for a month or two (it might have been because I was using AdNauseum, but I think it was just a problem with whitelisting YouTube's cookies and javascript, the problem went away after changing the latter and not the former). It was great for my productivity!
NewPipe is fantastic, but worth mentioning since I don't see it so far, that the one killer downside is "no support for Chromecasting/DLNA" [1] [2], which means I continue to keep the official YouTube app around for occasional use when I want a bigger screen.
It does include a built-in "play to kodi" feature, though, which fits my use-case better, personally.
But I agree that more options would be beter (Chromecast though I despise it, nymphcast).
Screen mirroring nearly completely defeats the purpose of a chromecast to me.
It has way poorer framerate, requires streaming to two places instead of one (from source to phone and then phone to cast device), requires the phone to stay awake thereby needing more power and wasting the phone display which I'll not look at, has a way worse interface for whatever app you're looking at, because what you see is a scaled up phone interface instead of one more suitable for a larger screen, ...
I essentially never use it when I can avoid it, and even when I need mirroring if I have a cable I'll use that instead.
Isn't it against Google's terms and conditions to run such an app that plays YouTube videos without playing the ads too? I remember reading about that.
NewPipe just scrapes the website. It uses no official APIs, and it does not try to fool the Google infrastructure into thinking it was the official YouTube app or something.
Google should, at least in theory, treat users of NewPipe same way it treats browser users with adblock.
Fun story: adblock does NOT block youtube ads. It would be almost impossible to - they are served from the same inscrutable urls as real videos. Instead youtube detects adblock and does not show ads to adblock users on purpose.
So next time you see a YouTube employee, thank them for that
Adblock Plus for example uses EasyList by default, and that contains this rule to block the ads:
youtube.com#@#.video-ads
Your claim might still be correct if google keeps that class name to avoid breaking adblockers (considering most other class names on google properties are randomly generated and change each week)
Actually, no.
> they are served from the same inscrutable urls as real video
This may be right, so host based adblocking may not work.
However, uBlock origin etc definitely block youtube ads and it works as a browser extension so they have access to the DOM and probably do something there.
I've noticed in the last few weeks that YouTube has some sort of fallback when an ad gets blocked. You get a white overlay with with impossible-to-read lightgrey text on it, with a blue button in the middle with a call to action on it (eg Signup Now, Click to Learn More). There is still a Skip Ad button and a widget to indicate when the ad will go away on its own.
I have two YouTube accounts, and at first it only happened on one. Now it is happening to both. Maybe it is something they are currently just testing.
Considering that Google charges subscription for this features, it's not only against ToS, but also unethical IMO.
It's one thing to hate a company and refuse to use their products and a whole nother thing to promote products that sidestep features the service asks money for.
I used to be in your camp but after Google had only showed a number of us irrelevant ads for years after years I decided it didn't matter: I don't want to date hot Russian/Taiwanese/Ukrainian/Thai women, I'm not interested in dating elderly women near me - and I'm not interested in dating guys either. Nothing against any of those persons, but I'm happily married after all so even the idea of browsing those sites is crazy to me (not that I used any of them before either).
With that I have almost exhausted the list of ads that Google thought has been relevant for me since I started dating my wife well over a decade ago.
Why they cannot show ads for family holidays, programming conferences, local stores etc I don't know but if I had to guess I'd say they could need some diversity on their teams ;-). (Adding a few married parents with stable marriages and small children should do the trick, but I am not interested and haven't been for a couple of years, I find Google close to disgusting sometimes and whatever technical edge it has has disappeared to the degree that I'm positively surprised to just see sane results like they used to be in 2007.)
Google not displaying relevant ads do NOT in any way make it less wrong. In your case, there are 2 'ethical' options: use premium or avoid the service. Btw I also use adblock so I am a part of the problem.
By paying for premium you support a company whose business model is based on selling emotional manipulation (i.e. ads). You support a company that violates your right to use the software of your choice on your personal property. And you give in to extortion by paying for not being exposed to emotional manipulation. Paying for premium is the unethical option here.
> By paying for premium you support a company whose business model is based on selling emotional manipulation
The corollary of that is that any interaction with such a company is unethical, since it encourages them to continue the manipulation on people who may not be as aware or resistant.
I therefore assume you've routed YouTube.com to :: ?
For a number of years I allowed them to run JS on my device and download ads from other servers to my device.
I have now instructed my rendering device to not do that. Even as a devout christian that doesn't feel unethical.
I'm free to try to avoid the ads, they are free (within limits) to get me to view ads.
A pro tip in that regard would be to make the ads relevant and unobtrusive.
A good first step here would be to include them statically on the server side and make sure they don't contain any moving or noisy elements.
Another good idea would be to select ads not solely on what company they can fleece for most money by showing me irrelevant ads but also factor in if the ad is in any way relevant.
A weird justification, "Oh they show me irrelevant ads" Just say that you don't care. Or do the right thing and either pay, don't watch or use it with ads.
On the other hand, blocking absolutely adequate YouTube accounts (engineering, education, history) without explanation and appeal process is super unethical. Creating monopoly (which definition YouTube perfectly fits) is not only unethical, but against the law, as well as constant user's privacy violations.
Some content creators on YT (such as Legal Eagle, etc.) are also now on Nebula. $15 USD per year right now. Apparently they don't have to worry so much about de-monetization, however that works.
Being the dominant player in the market doesn't make it illegal. It has to either have reached the dominant status through illegal means or engage in activities that help it maintain the position by destroying competition using anti-competitive means. What did youtube do to be "against the law"?
To all the downvoters: you are experiencing cognitive dissonance. You cheat, yet convince yourself somehow that what you do isn’t wrong. But deep, deep down you know.
On the other hand, leveraging the network effect to form a monopoly which compromises privacy and user security by coordinating with state aggressors around the globe...probably more unethical than controlling the software running on your own device?
I believe the F-Droid version is currently one patch behind. You can actually add https://archive.newpipe.net/fdroid/repo in F-Droid as a repository and you'll get the updates for NewPipe a lot faster.
I actually ended up going down a different route and created my own F-Droid repository for NewPipe and a couple other apps so I could get faster updates for them and I trust the upstream developers.
Most likely. I understand the appeal of these types of applications but it really just comes off as entitled IMO. Just watch the ads to support the content creators you care about - it isn’t that hard.
I imagine this will be an unpopular opinion here though.
It's certainly not a popular opinion, but it's definitely an uninformed opinion. The aim of NewPipe is not to "stick it to the man" or even to advertisers, it's to create a superior viewing experience that removes much of the bloat of Youtube's official app, and also being light on system resources. Whereas the official app used to crash and warm up my Moto G5 Plus, NewPipe has been running like a dream for years.
I'm really not sure what you mean by this comment. Are you talking about NewPipe?
NewPipe is not a re-release of any Android Play Store app, or like any hacked app (like YouTube Vanced). It provides features beyond even YouTube Premium's featureset, removes perceived anti-features like Google Play Services integration, and is much more lightweight to boot.
That is really absurd logic. It doesn't take very long to click on the OP's link, visit the project homepage, and see that NewPipe offers far more than just being ad-free. The home-page mentions ads a grand total of 1 times.
Not that it addresses paying for the infrastructure, but many of the creators I watch are now reading ad copy within their videos and are otherwise sponsored directly.
It doesn't remove ads, it just doesn't play them. Why do you expect the developer spend effort on funneling money to Google while degrading the viewing experience?
Counterpoint: the amount of advertisements needed to sustain video production ultimately hinders the value of the video.
If I'm watching an hour long video about X, and I have to watch 40 mid-roll ads, I'm way more likely to turn it off. I'd much rather directly support creators via Patreon, and Adblock everything else.
Well, if you want an example, the premium subscription is not available in my country. I send a small sum (small by Western standards and pretty substantial to me) once or twice a year directly to the creators of two channels I am interested in.
The entitlement among the general population is a little nuts. We expect things for free, without ads, and with high reliability. In this case we also want additional features like not logging in, downloads and background playback. Side note: Is it any wonder that journalism is dying when no one wants to pay for it (or be subject to advertising)?
YouTube is asking that their users either watch ads or pay money. That's how YouTube and creators can keep the lights on. I think that's a fair model. There are other models, like Vimeo, where the uploader pays for the hosting.
It certainly seems like the future is one where we expect access to everything and pay for nothing. That worries me.
YouTube makes a profit, after all operational costs are accounted for, they aren't paying creators what they're owed. Why would I support a company who regularly short changes the creators who work hard to produce quality content?
Hmm, YouTube pays out massive amount of money every year to creators (if I remember their revenue report, it's majority of their revenue), so I'm not sure what exactly are you talking about?
I'd be more than happy to pay google for add free youtube if they weren't also stealing my data. Bottom line is that I should be able to set the price for my data and they wouldn't want to pay me what it is worth to me.
in the olden days, i could walk into a newsagent/video shop, pick up a product, exchange some plesantries, put down some coins, and walk out. no-one would know my name or anything about me.
nowadays, if you want to pay for a newspaper article or a video, you have to fork over all your pii and oblige yourself to paying a certain sum in the future unless you do something to cancel it.
there is no fairness in commerce any more. they treat us like hostiles, and we have to treat them like hostiles.
the current choice isn't between paying for it or pirating it, it's between handing over your identity and future income or actively hiding.
one party to this commercial transaction doesn't need to eat and has an income the size of hundreds of thousands of the other side.
NewPipe doesn't need to be trusted where Google actively requires you to trust them - yet repeatedly acts untrustworthily.
If they want me to happily give them money, let me do it without trusting those who do not deserve my trust. I shouldn't have to trust corporations.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I appreciate it, ferzul.
I 100% agree that personal data has unfortunately found its way into a transaction in which it should not belong. I respect the fact that you push back on this point, though I do find "treat them like hostiles" as an extreme position. Other entities offer transactions that I find abhorrent, and I simply just refuse to interact with them.
If paying for physical media (be it movies or newspapers or anything else) with "coins" is still valuable to you, I encourage you to continue to practice that behavior, and encourage others as well. It is still mostly possible in many cases.
> ...Google actively requires you to trust them... ... I shouldn't have to trust corporations.
Regarding YouTube, you can still interact with them in a trustless environment. Browse in incognito mode in a non-Google browser. Google gets to show an ad to an anonymous user and you get to watch a video. End of transaction.
Ha! People are downvoting your comment too. I am also interested in a civil discussion about why people believe they are entitled to the content and service without contributing back. Maybe downvotes are easier than thoughtful replies.
i did not but i do not pay youtube premium. Mostly because all that money will go to RIAA and other DMCA backers, not content creators. Specially not the ones everyone here watches.
Nobody uses youtube because they love it. Everyone uses youtube because google effectively killed all the competition by sliding billions of investor money to DMCA backers. And well, this one time it worked out nice for them, i guess. But it is not a business practice I will support. Fortunately, i'm technical enough to play their cat and mouse game to consume creators who are hostage to their monopoly on discovery.
While an interesting question, 99% of people are just looking for free content, not for alternate ways to support content creators. So it's not all that relevant of a question.
That's a good question, ideally the creator should provide as many options for support as they can, in order to capture as much revenue for their work. It's then on the consumer to decide which they're most comfortable with, whether it's advertisement, or direct support, etc.
As entitled as it may be, I will assert my right to limit the data I send to Google.
It is a mistake to assume that everyone blocks ads because they do not want to watch ads. In my case, it is playing a game of damage control with a major corporation that has the ability to connect my activities across much of the web. Other people legitimately point to the cost of bandwidth. I am sure that other reasons exist.
It is also to the benefit if creators if they diversify their revenue streams. At the moment, they are far too dependent upon decisions made by Google. Some have realized this by requesting donations from users, merchandising, baking in ads from sponsors, and promoting alternate distribution mechanisms. While seeking out other sources of revenues creates problems for people who are just starting out, it is pretty much a necessity for people who are seeking to earn money from their work.
> It is also to the benefit if creators if they diversify their revenue streams.
Watching content on YouTube while blocking ads does not encourage creators to go to other platforms. You've already consumed their product, thus lessening demand, so there's less reason to put it on another platform. It's not likely you'll go watch it on Vimeo after they upload it there when you've already seen it on YouTube.
Creators may be better off with a donation and merchandise revenue stream. Describing your actions as "benefitting" them by helping them see this by depriving them of revenue from you for their content is a slightly odd take though.
> Describing your actions as "benefitting" them by helping them see this by depriving them of revenue from you for their content is a slightly odd take though.
The claim was that creators would benefit from diversifying, not that my actions were benefiting them. I was quite clear that my motivations were related to Google.
I'm happy to support content creators with patreon when they offer a way to do so. _Especially_ when they offer a way to see their videos off YouTube. I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.
I mostly use YouTube to discover niche content, but only because I've been running an ad-blocker since forever. I cannot fathom how anyone could enjoy it in any other way currently. When I see how IT works at friend's houses I'm horrified.
If YT blocked access for browsers with ad-blockers (or make it inconvenient enough) I would essentially stop using it.
Being semi curious why creators aren't already using any of the other hosts, I poked around a bit.
OMG.
Whereas YouTube is a toxic cesspool, the others are blackhole hellmouths leading directly to eternal damnation. Meaning the wannabe's complete abrogation of their responsibilities show that YouTube's pathetic attempts at content moderation are better than nothing.
I now think there's an opportunity for white label video hosting.
> I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.
You're supporting them just by using them, whether they are showing you ads or tracking you or not. You're reducing demand on other platforms for this content because you're letting YouTube provide it for you. If you really want to stand against YouTube, don't use it. Otherwise, you're still supporting their platform, you've just decided to do so in a way that saves you time, money and convenience at the expense of YouTube and the content creators on YouTube.
If you're going to do it, you might as well own it.
You're absolutely right of course. But it's still a chicken-and-egg problem. YT is frequently the only platform where content creators publish because of network effects.
I guess it's too easy for me to continue using YT for discovery.
Yep, and it's those network effects which are strengthened through using YouTube even if they aren't making revenue from ads through you.
It's similar to disliking Walmart and Amazon but still using them because they are cheap, convenient, a known factor, etc, which many do (including me, in the case of Amazon). The first step is acknowledging the trade-off you're making and being aware of it. At least then people are making a conscious choice, so if they want to re-evaluate at some point, they can do so with better facts.
I think most people get enough benefit out of YouTube to warrant the fee. But advertisements allow the platform to be available to anyone with an internet connection. Fair trade off I’d say.
Except for all the entitled people in this very topic who demand this service to work for free, refuse to pay for subscription and still don't want ads either.
It's not simply about the consumers. Google is playing a balancing game between pushing ads on enough people to make the service sustainable, while still willingly allowing the people who want to block ads to do so.
With their resources and the nature of the service, they could easily win the cat-and-mouse game against ad-blocker devs if they wanted to.
The reason they don't, is because they actually want to keep those "entitled people" on their platform, in order to avoid giving competing platforms an opening to grow their own communities. They know there is a substantial part of their userbase who would simply not use their service if they had to either pay or endure the vanilla experience.
I agree with your statement but there are other sides too.
Regarding ads:
Showing ads like "Girl Mobile Video Talk" with description "Girl Mobile Number Live Video Call" with "Install Link" in a youtube ads is unacceptable. And the worst thing is you cannot even turn off that ads without being turning on ads personalization.
Regarding Money:
10$ may be a cup of coffee for you but in other side of world people are earning 200$ of salary so they just can't afford it. So many people don't have privilege like average Americans have?
Regarding supporting creators.
Sure ads pay creator but showing ads every 10minute , beginning of video and end of video is total BS. And even creator are already using their own ads like "This video is sponsored by Brilliant.org" so I don't mind blocking ads.
a good trick is to mute the sound and focus on the countdown button on the right hand side. that way you don't really see the ad at all but if anyone is collecting metrics on whether the ad was displayed they will register it
Oh we can discuss payment for google services as soon as they pay me for all the data they collect on me all over the internet and my phone - it isn't that hard.
Yeah, I would recommend not signing in from your google and I might be paranoid, but I disable play protect. I've heard stories of accounts being banned for using newpipe, but they may just be stories with no basis behind it.
Ytdl is use by other programs as a backend and can so indirectly support streaming rather than downloading; ex. if you have both installed, you can `mpv $YT_URL` and it'll work.
To be fair, I do pay for subscriptions for a few YouTubers. Wintergatan in particular is excellent. Of course, many creatives are using Patreon and other external revenue sources and frankly that's wise, given YouTube's track record with unusual copyright strikes and other platform nonsense.
Even if I were to pay for Youtube Red, this application has a feature that I cannot get with the official app: a lack of dependence on the Google Play store and services. Since I run a build of Android that does not include those services, this app is wonderful to bridge the gap, as it performs much better than playing the videos directly in Firefox. That it happens to include a bunch of extra features the official app does not is just a bonus really.
This is actually the situation I'm in. Google Play Services are disabled on my device so I cannot use any YouTube premium features anyways.
If there was a way to pay for YouTube premium and make the money go to the creators I watch while using a FOSS client like NewPipe, I'd be willing to pay several more times the current price of YouTube premium for that.
The youtube-dl script has been available for what, a decade already? Has that not been long term enough for you? Newpipe is just an Android UI around the same functionality as youtube-dl.
I wonder why this is being downvoted - Google asks for subscription for features that this app hacks for free. In any other context this would be deemed unethical (or even piracy). E.g. think of an application that streams Apple Music without paying Apple or distributors of cracked apps with enabled in-app purchase features.
And yet the HN community happily endorses such apps when it comes to Google. I also wonder why moderators think that this is acceptable in terms of YouTube.
That's not piracy. Youtube is sending you packets, out of their own choice. It's my own right to save those packets(without re-distributing) them and watch them in any form I like.
Playing in the background is not a "feature", it's a basic device capability, the fact that YouTube went out of their way to prevent it does not make it right, imagine if the browser client had stopped playing when you went out of focus - that'd be completely unacceptable. The fact that somehow this is accepted on smartphones probably says more about consumers lack of technological competence and awareness (and maybe historical reasons, as earlier versions of Android/iOS didn't have proper multi-tasking)
In most cases (my experience comes from working in broadcast industry but not specifically YouTube), those restrictions are there due to creators wanting to be paid for background playback (this is in 99% cases for music, where not adding this restriction would essentially make creators and the might copyright holders unpaid).
So bypassing the wishes of copyright holder / creator and getting the content for free is pretty much textbook definition of piracy.
Now, we can debate whether piracy is ethical in some cases (and I think it is in many cases, especially due to how cancerous the copyright lobby is these days). But let's not pretend that having a service provider say "hey, pay us 10$ a month for this feature" and then making an app that gives that paid feature for free is some kind of right.
With Android, I believe you could always run anything you wanted in the background, provided you had enough memory. Starting with versions 5-6, restrictions have been put in to prevent abuses and battery draining with the user unaware of it. The two OSs converged towards a mean point from opposite directions in this case.
They're inconsistent. On Firefox Android you can't play in the background using the mobile site but if you switch to the desktop site all of a sudden background play starts working.
That's because Google deliberately prevents background playback on mobile devices, bringing mobile browsers down to the same level of the YouTube app using shady JavaScript APIs. This add-on should fix it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...
That's not what piracy means, and that's not how the law works. If I state that the terms of service of reading this comment are that you must hop on one leg for the rest of your life, and you continue to walk on two, you won't be violating any laws.
I didn't say you're violating laws (but you may well be violating DMCA sections), I said you're violating terms of service. The expectation could be that they halt your use of the service, block access to their other service, and may disable your account.
OP claimed, "It's my own right to save those packets(without re-distributing) them and watch them in any form I like." That is not accurate. He doesn't magically GAIN COPYRIGHT over content, just because he downloaded it. His use MAY be covered by Fair Use Laws, but it may also still be a violation of YouTube's Terms of Service.
Google is willfully sending the data. If they want stricter access controls it's their job to implement them. TOS isn't a binding contract since one side never gets a chance to negotiate terms.
Yes, and if they start identifying Google accounts that share the IP of a device violating YouTube TOS and disabling those accounts, some people will be very sad.
They should at least consider the possibility. Go in with open eyes, so to say.
> Yes, and if they start identifying Google accounts that share the IP of a device violating YouTube TOS and disabling those accounts, some people will be very sad.
If this happens, even more people will take their eggs out of Google's basket. I've already migrated my email to another provider and use Searx[1] for search.
If you do use it, please don't violate the TOS, because it increases the chances you'll screw it up for everyone else (me). People who violate TOS are why we can't have nice things.
Nowhere did I imply that I'd gain copyright over the content.
What's the difference between downloading and streaming a video? It's OK for the bytes to stay in main memory/network cache, but not in HDD? Would taking a memory dump of the RAM break their TOS?
Assuming this is true(that there's a clause against viewing YouTube with a third party client), then they're free to ban users like me from their service(and suffer the PR backlash),
that doesn't mean that breaking that clause is unethical or illegal(I'm not from the US, we don't have draconian internet laws here)
Under the heading, "Permissions and Restrictions":
> The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:
> 1. access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders;
> 2. circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;
> 3. access the Service using any automated means (such as robots, botnets or scrapers) except (a) in the case of public search engines, in accordance with YouTube’s robots.txt file; or (b) with YouTube’s prior written permission;
The users using 3rd party apps don't violate any of these terms (I'm sure you could argue it both ways depending on the specific legal terms depending on the context; IANAL). The app itself is probably violating some of these terms, but for the end users, they are not doing any of the things described, they are just using the app.
I think this is just one of those cases where copyright/IP law moves too slowly compared to the technology it tries to cover.
> They are "accessing ... part of the Service or Content [without being] expressly authorized."
Are they though? AFAIK, law is very pedantic, and technically speaking, a human is physically incapable of accessing Youtube; we use tools to do so. We use some kind of software to access youtube.com, in this case, we are using an app that accesses youtube.com and relays the content on that page back to us. Similar to say, using Chrome or Firefox to access youtube.com and relay the contents on the page back to us.
Note, the APP accesses youtube.com, not the user. The app is (potentially) in violation, the user using the app is not. In fact, the user may not even know that the app is actually accessing youtube. Again, IANAL and I'm sure this is argued both ways, but I'm just saying this is an interpretation of the terms.
I mean hey the NRA has argued this successfully about guns (or maybe their money argued it successfully) so why not? Lets start a rock lobby to allow more rock freedom
I'd like to focus on a single point here: background playback. If anything, it's Google that's stepping over the boundaries in this situation, trespassing the typical boundaries of an app and breaking the natural interaction model. How I consume (or not) the output of an app should be none of its business. I expect to be able to switch windows, minimize, look away, turn off the screen or mute the volume without the app knowing and acting differently. Forbidding me to do so is an artificial anti-feature and doesn't bring me any sympathy towards Google and their paid offering.
I would keep using NewPipe along with the official app even if it showed ads (which I consider tolerable in YouTube's case) for sanity-restoring features like this one.
I don't think it is that simple. When it comes to not playing the ads, I agree that is a problem. When it comes to the features, I think it is different.
One of the features is background playback of audio from videos. On the desktop, that's a feature that exists thanks to your window manager. Is that unethical?
It isn't stealing to use another method to get a feature someone is selling you, any more than using a third party DVR is stealing from a company offering you one as part of a more expensive package.
They have implemented the feature independently, and are providing it as a way of doing the same thing as something YouTube is selling you, I don't see that as a problem.
(NewPipe also has features that YouTube's app just doesn't support at all, like higher speed playback than 2x).
The big thing is that pirates would most likely not pay for the thing they are pirating if it was not available legally. This isn't by any means universal but take video games for example.
Developers have long since abandoned the concept of providing demos to "try the game" before you buy it. If I am thinking about buying a game but can't be convinced that I'll get my money's worth, I'll pirate the game. If I end up liking the game, I might as well buy it so that I can use online features, receive updates, and not have to worry with the crack causing weird bugs. In these cases, piracy has filled in the roll of demo software and provides a net positive for companies because any converts to paying customers would likely have never purchased the game had they not pirated it.
Alternatively, look at something like the anime fansub scene. Fansubs often have far better quality than anything you'll see coming from legitimate anime streaming services. I pay for anime streaming subscriptions but I can't count the number of times I've refused to watch something on the service due to how bad the subtitles were, torrented an actually good fansub, and then supported the series (not the streaming platform) through alternative means.
You also have the digital preservation aspect. Piracy is the reason most early console games are playable nowadays. Emulators aren't really legal and all of the published ROMs are very much pirated content but if they didn't exist, how many games would be either extraordinarily rare or lost to time by now. Same goes for music. What.cd was an incredible archive of music and it preserved tonnes of tracks from small now defunct bands throughout the start of the millennium. This is all content that would otherwise be lost to time if pirates hadn't preserved them due to their own motivations.
There's more on this out on the web. I read a really cool article about it a while back but I can't find it atm.
The difference here is that you’re not downloading a copy of a video from one private user to another. You’re downloading the video from Google, using Google’s bandwidth and their servers.
From google's perspective, I would assume that it is much like MS allowing software pirating: It doesn't matter if you watch the ads as long as you don't watch the ads on youtube.
Google needs your preferences more than they need to show you an ad immediately. They can also show you an ad on their search space or any of the sides that use the Google ad network. It actually might be cheaper for them to show you the ad elsewhere when they don't have to pay the youtube content creator as I would assume that the creators don't get any money if their audience doesn't watch the immediate ads in the video.
Sure. Download the APK from the F-Droid website [1] and install it with adb install. If you want to build it yourself, you can build it like any regular Android app with gradle, or by following the F-Droid recipe [2] (edit: which does not provide much useful information in the case of NewPipe, but it can be a great source of information for apps that are more difficult to build, especially if you want to remove the proprietary bits / tracking parts).
You won't get automatic updates, though. I encourage you to install F-Droid (that you can also install using adb install), and enable third party sources just for F-Droid (which is possible on the latest versions of Android). Or, if your bootloader is unlocked, flash the f-droid zip package and then you don't even need to enable third party apps and F-Droid will be even more enjoyable to use.
The ads in youtube this past year have been a bit scary. I'm assuming some weird ads are getting past the moderators because I'm in Sweden, and it's not a big ad market maybe.
Either way, I get misspelled ads, or ads that just say "18 YEAR OLD WOMEN" in some shitty 1999 font that is barely legible.
Edit: I'm talking about the clickable ads interspersed between videos in the UI.
I've been getting ads for months now that show a devastating natural disaster approaching my location. It was very alarming the first few times I saw it. Reporting it has done nothing.
All app stores are far shadier thans torrents websites or worse, warez websites of old. App stores come with spyware, adware, and regularly mineware or worden. I visit torrent websites for peace of mind.
But mostly F-droid, which has Newpipe. Both excellent and reliable and shite-free.
I really don't get app stores. How did they convince everyone to install so much spy and adware?
I don't really understand your point, F-Droid is definitely an app store.
I think you must mainly mean the Google Play Store, where the situation seems really bad... As for Apple, they manually review every application. I remember iOS apps for jailbreaking getting removed incredibly quickly.
F droid is an exception. Google, Apple and Microsoft app stores are the best guarantee you're installing spyware. That's what ubiquitous telemetry is after all.
They have a shady vibe to them is what I mean. Like e-mail spam.
Another example is "Generic viking game", like literally. It just says some generic viking game, no brand or recognizable name. It looks just like phishing.
As a YouTube Premium user it's a lot less annoying, but what's frustrating for me is it not being simple to go back to a video after accidentally exiting it (where in a browser you would just go back to that tab, or press back or whatever).
Also the application crashes all the time, especially when switching to play in the background (locking the screen, switching apps, etc.); and as of Android 10 on my device it introduces a delay when switching to background play, which interrupts the audio (it didn't do this on Android 9).
Oh yeah the back button UX is bad. If you do multiple searches in a row, the back button doesn't exit the search screen, it goes back through your searches. But if you're watching a video and accidentally click on a different video, the back button doesn't take you the the previous video, it goes to the home screen.
This is the opposite of what I want, the search bar has a scroll menu with the most recent searches anyway, I really have no need to traverse my search history.
For Android, I just use the standard YouTube mobile site with fennec Firefox and ublock origin. Seems to work fairly well on my old S6 for 1080p60 content and below.
I suspect that's not very battery efficient though.
This is why, despite all its shortcomings, Android still is a more open platform compared to iOS. Big thanks to F-Droid and the open source Android community.
I had another comment refuting the GP (as you are), but the more I thought about it, I decided to delete the comment.
At the end of the day, you have to pay $99/year to publish on the Apple App Store, and on Android, although Google has had some shady practices around automatically flagging/removing apps from it's store, you have more options in terms of app distribution, such as F-Droid.
To my (now deleted) comment's point though, I don't see much of a relation between F-Droid and NewPipe, besides that F-Droid hosts it.
EDIT: other comment on this thread answers that last point I made and your question, and sums up what NewPipe has to do with the "openness" of the platforms [1]. However, I now wonder, what is stopping Google/YouTube from going after NewPipe & F-Droid?
Not just the money & the need to obtain another protform for app development (MacOS) but also the te inability to public GPL apps on app store (if you manage to get that far):
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not very familiar with iOS, but it's not so much F-Droid that makes Android great, but rather the fact that you are allowed to install apps outside of the Play Store. As far as I know, that's not possible on iOS without jailbreak (or the whole Testflight stuff that was being abused).
F-Droid is just a visible example of that functionality.
Interesting, thanks. I wonder how such an app would go if it only supported ad-free viewing for Youtube Premium accounts. So that the point would be additional features, not blocking ads.
Even in a world where Apple does not prevent YouTube alternative clients in its app store, it would probably prevent alternative clients for its own services.
Or, an app that would go as far as doing such deviant things as providing its own custom web engine and allow an iPad 2 to remain relevant and useful in 2020.
why hasn't anyone built a fully-featured desktop Youtube front-end experience? With, like, borderless floating video (a la Firefox's floating video feature), dimming the desktop, a search experience that doesn't bombard you with clickbait garbage, etc?
it seems like Youtube.com is really just a fancy mp4 player, targeting static video content.
does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing? What's their stance on them? Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?
> does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing?
Not really, no. Though they took some kind of legal action against Hooktube I remember.
> Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?
They already do this to some extent for videos with copyrighted content, but it's not very aggressive and has long been reverse-engineered and dealt with. They use a series of three string transformations like reversal, replacing a single letter, etc. on an alphanumeric signature parameter. The sequence of transformations varies per video but can be extracted from the Javascript source using regular expressions.
Here are some available clients I know of. I do not know if there any that use floating videos or dim the desktop as you say:
I used this a bit on a previous Android phone I had. (I still use Android, but am on a newer one now) It sounds good in theory but had a lot of rough edges that made me just go back to regular Youtube. I remember running into a lot of hiccups going full screen and not full screen, or rotating screens, or moving forward or backward on a video. Nothing was completely breaking but it was all minor issues like switching between full screen and not either stops a video or throws you back etc. Maybe I never got used to it.
And most of all, and this is weird to admit on HN, I kind of enjoy Youtube's algorithm of recommending videos -- it actually presents content that I would be interested in. Every time I opened Newpipe it was just a random mishmash of stuff, maybe it's what's on the default Youtube homepage or something, but it's never something I'm interested in. It's nice for when I want to explicitly search for something to watch, but not if I want to just open up the app and tap some random video to start watching.
I'll just add a side note that I don't watch political videos or anything and it's not about echo chamber or bubbles. I just watch videos about old video games (think AVGN etc.) or listen to music by artists I enjoy, and those are the videos that show up on my Youtube which is nice.
Of all things I am grateful to NewPipe for, the best is that I am able to turn off the screen of my mobile while listening to Podcasts hosted on YouTube, and also to run it in the background. Thank you, developers!!!
Well, I've been there with having to implement Google's login outside Google, and I can say that it is most definitely non-trivial.
To get the official Google token, you must go through a massive wad of obfuscated JavaScript in a browser VM. It uses a thing called "BotGuard" for which barely any information is available online to prevent automated logins, and apparently the code changes on every request to the login form. I know this from poking around at the page source and seeing a blurb advertising their credential security division slipped in at the top, like they just know that the only way you're getting that token is if it's exactly how Google and that security division wanted you to, and they felt the need to inform everyone attempting to reverse engineer the thing by looking at the source what they think of their effort.
This is the reason why we don't have Google login in another unofficial YouTube frontend called invidious[1] and youtube-dl[2].
That's right, not even youtube-dl can handle logging in to YouTube since about April 2019. That was about the time that Google apparently got around to patching their auth endpoint so you have to run their obfuscated JavaScript if you want in. Since then scores of issues reporting 400 responses from trying to download Watch Later or private playlists were posted on youtube-dl's tracker, collected in the issue I mentioned. Their response? Close it as a duplicate without, well, any other response. None as of present writing, eight months later. Exactly the same response as nearly every other issue reporting the same error.
That is a misstep on youtube-dl's part, and has greatly affected my impression of the project's leadership, but part of me also thinks that they don't want to admit that it's nearly impossible to get past a system Google specifically designed to be impossible for third-party clients to get past.
Just a thought: maybe it could add a function to just sync user's subscriptions via scraping their user page? Of course this requires you to make it public, but at least it would provide an additional option.
Serious question: What is the ethical argument for watching videos ad-free this way vs paying for YouTube Premium? (as long as it's available in your country, and you can afford it)
By removing ads, you're viewing content without paying back in any meaningful way.
You might say that you give donations to the content creators you really like, but I don't find that very convincing (you cannot donate to every small YouTuber you ever encounter while browsing, not all content creators churn out 100s of videos).
Besides, it probably costs a ton of money to store/process billions of videos each month, and stream billions of 1080p (or even 4K) of videos to all devices.
I understand people are fundamentally against ads (I also find them life-sucking and extremely obnoxious), but there is an option that does just that while fairly contributing back into the ecosystem that produces your content.
I've used this from the start.
Btw you don't need to give your google account to use this in any way. It is a fully functional (better) youtube client.
Been using it for a while now and there's no need to log in with your account - in fact, you can't! You have to import subscriptions over, and easy to follow instructions to do this are provided. The only thing you can't to is comment, but for the few times I actually want to comment, its no hassle to go to the mobile website.
My only major complaint is that the colour of the seek bar is hard to see on black backgrounds.
I absolutely love NewPipe but I do think that it progresses very slowly and that might be why it is often ignored for the other popular pip youtube client, youtube vanced.
Maybe it is just the rate at which binaries get released... For example, it has had comments support for some time now but only for top level comments. However, iirc the pull request that introduced this also had an example implementation of fully working comment support. So why is this not yet implemented?
I recognise that I should probably just build from master or some dev branch which has more features myself...
I'm completely against Google usage of personal informations and hate annoying and bad ux on official YouTube app but, to be honest, ads support creators with revenue so when you "avoid ads", you are harming creators too, not only Google.
I think that if you don't like YT app and advertising, you simply shouldn't use YouTube.
Everyone I follow on YouTube that is trying to make any money there uses some other form of revenue. Mostly embedded ads, affiliate links, sponsorships, and merchandise. These work regardless of whether you watch Google's ads.
...in addition to YouTube ad monetization. You know how important YouTube ads and prime are because of how much those same creators scream when they get demonitized.
This argument is as old as time, and the counterpoint is simply "it's revenue they were not getting regardless".
Those of us who don't want to see ads ever, for any reason aren't stealing or harming anyone, we simply don't want to see ads -- saying "well don't use the service" is not all of a sudden getting the creators back any revenue, and no, if there's interesting stuff on YouTube, I'm going to use it, and do so without seeing ads. I'll support the creators I want to support elsewise.
While I support the sentiment, you know that's not how all advertising works? CPM ads mean the publisher makes money because you saw the ad, regardless of whether you clicked on it (CPC).
Even if you never click an ad or buy anything from an ad, you are still helping the publisher make money.
(I work in advertising, so yes I know how it works :)
The hypothetical being discussed is "it's better to not use the service at all than to use it and block an ad". In this scenario, which impression would have been shown that now is not? Either way, no money is made by the content creator.
The only way that person would make money is the third scenario which it seems you're talking about, whereby I use the service and watch an ad (and yes, for some of us, that will never happen).
But such YT such the majority of any other service/work, isn't free: it requires a form of monetization in a way or another and YT uses advertisment. They have enourmous costs and they have much bigger revenues. If everybody blocks ads then they shut down.
You don't work for free, neither them.
I'm not a paladin of advertisment, simply saying those are their service conditions (that as a side effect provide money to content creators too).
Don't like their terms of use? Well, don't use their service.
Or adopt the other option they provide paying a premium account
I didn't read them as saying anything about refraining from clicking ads. I took them to be saying they will avoid ads entirely, not viewing them but not clicking.
Do you think we should be forced to consume all content that gets shoved down our throats, never turn away or cover your ears or close your eyes? Because that's what you seem to be implying.
My eyes, my ears, my brain. I'll consume your content how I want.
I think that if you don't accept the terms of use of a service, then you shouldn't use that service and consuming advertisment is exactly how the YT service has been conceived: its primary monetization form is advertising so if i want to use its service, i have to consume ads. If i don't want to see their ads then i'm completely free to not use that service.
I think similar considerations are valid for ads on websites too.
You are completely misunderstanding what i'm saying! What i want to say is that if a service requires you to pay to use it, then you have to pay if you want to use it; if a service is free but requires you to see commercials to be used then you have to see them if you want to use it. If a software requires you to pay a one shot payment then you have to pay it once, if another requires you to pay a subscription then you have to pay a recurrent subscription.
I'm just saying that you have to accept the rules or terms of service if you want to use a non-vital private-company owned service otherwise you can simply stop using that service.
You are not compelled to watch YT even if it has a predominant position.
And you still have the right to complain (like i do too) about the horrible privacy issues with today's advertisment but that is a completely different topic
How much of the YouTube premium fee goes to content creators? Why would that be better than donating directly to the content creators? Or are you suggesting that we should be philanthropic towards Alphabet Inc.?
Most channels I regularly I watch on youtube don't have a way to donate to them. The premium fee gets distributed in proportion to the channels I watch.
And I'm sure I'll get roasted for this but YT isn't free to run either. Alphabet Inc. should get some money from you if you are watching youtube, and I'd rather I just pay them than watch an ad from them.
Nice. Just discovered that you can open videos from the official YouTube client by using the "Share" menu and selecting NewPipe. It has multiple options, including download/open/open as popup.
This make it much more useful for me, I can still have access to my YouTube account but I can open the actual videos in NewPipe and skip ads/have more control of the playback options.
Also, this bug from official YouTube app does not happen in NewPipe, making it much more useful to me since I use a custom caption settings because Amazon Prime Video (but they look horrible in official YouTube app because there is no outline): https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/e935yz/bug_caption...
Awesome! This type of app will always lead to greater conversions for Youtube Premium. I had Youtube vanced and could not live without those features but I also wanted to support creators so I got Youtube Premium and never looked back
Looks nice, but no ability to set default playback speed means I'll stick with (the rarely updated) Vanced. I never watch YT content at <1.25x speed unless it's to hear a music track.
It also looks like it doesn't have the option to login and sync, so I'd be seeing already watched stuff on between desktop and mobile. I understand why some people wouldn't want that, but I use the feature all the time and would like the option.
I might try it as a kind of backup app for things I want to track, but don't want suggestions for (mostly technical videos).
Incredible. The idea that YouTube artificially limits the function to get you to do stuff is really annoying. I love that you can send the audio to the background. I've wanted that for years.
IIRC they used to let you do that a decade ago, then slowly made it harder and harder until it was impossible. Its a 'feature' now of youtube premium so take that as you will.
To those who are looking for few convincing features over YouTube app - It has background playback, download, pop out player all without having to sign-in to any account.
This is a side note, but: I tried to install newpipe (by first installing F Droid), and Google prevented my pixel 3 from doing so because I am a user of Advanced Protection Program.
The OS has application permissions for apps: why is a feature designed to protect my account (and only my account) preventing me from independently installing free and open source software?
Another major advantage (for me) of NewPipe over any official app is that it supports other services (such as SoundCloud).
I find the ability to seamlessly switch between services, and create playlists containing both YouTube videos and SoundCloud audio, to be a complete game-changer.
I doubt I could easily go back to the official YouTube app now.
When I'd click on the link, I get download failed... and the version I'm seeing on F-Droid was 2yo... I did download and install via the github repo.... may play with it a bit more later.
F-Droid definitely wasn't a recent one when I tried (in the comment above) it now seems to be showing more recent ones on my phone... I don't use f-droid often, so may have been a syncing/update issue or something else.
I've been following this app for a while, and for a long time I was using a PR version of the app that kept the subscription list in order of time (which didn't exist for a really long time). But they finally merged it a while back, so the published app finally became usable for me.
Remember, "your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." If Google catches you attempting to circumvent ads, they are within their rights to consider you a thief and treat you accordingly.
Google can't be too happy that people access their service without paying either with eyeball time for advertisers or money for Youtube Red or whatever it is called today
Anybody know why YouTube doesn't plug the ad-bypassing loophole of fetching the content directly youtube-dl style? I presume this NewPipe client is doing something similar...
Could they? I suppose they could concatenate ads into the video files directly, sort of like an old TV "stream"...
...except I have a decades-old VCR that can skip those too, so the technology today could probably deal with that pretty easily.
"ad-bypassing" is essentially choosing not to consume content; while most if not all DRM and other protections are for preventing people from consuming content, preventing them from not consuming content is nearly impossible unless you essentially have control over their minds.
What does ad-free mean?
Arent ads embedded in the youtube videos itself such that when you play a long video, multiple ads show up in the beginning, middle and end of the video ?
No. The ads are separate video files that get played after each other by the browser or youtube app. Since this app is complete independent it just choose to not play the video ads
I hadn't seen a Youtube ad in years, but now Youtube gives "An error occurred. Please try again later." on first load in Safari on a Mac with Wipr. Reloading without blockers gives ads before and every few minutes and some overlays. Miserable.
It's still easy to work around, but maybe Google's getting more aggressive about blockers.
uBlock Origin in Firefox still successfully blocks all ads. Also, youtube-dl continues to work and doesn't download the ads, so media players like mpv can play youtube videos and will never show an ad.
In an app's context, I think it means _additional_ ads. In this case though, since on YouTube the ads are not baked into the original video, it also means that you get to watch the content without these ads that are represented by a yellow bar on YouTube.
There are people whose living is made from YouTube and it’s advertising component.
Whilst I would personally prefer videos with no ads, is this not stealing?
I would be very interested to hear this groups view on why this is morally ok. Also what alternatives there should be to an ad revenue model for YouTube type sites.
> Whilst I would personally prefer videos with no ads, is this not stealing?
The usual response you'll get is "is it stealing if I go to the bathroom during a TV ad break?" or "that's why content creators have in-video paid sponsorship blurbs"
I personally think those are flimsy justifications though. I think it's stealing to bypass ads when the company hosting the service has a clear avenue for paid ad-free viewing.
It would be like creating an app that streams the free-tier of Crunchyroll ad-free while still using Crunchyroll's bandwidth. Dishonest.
If there's a publicly exposed service with no authentication or security in place, it is not the fault of an individual for using it. It's clearly not illegal, and neither is it unethical. If YouTube wants to protect their service from unauthorized use, they are perfectly capable of doing so.
One time when I lived in Rome, I was near Ostia and I saw a public water fountain. The funny thing though was that someone had attached a water hose to the water output and then ran the hose into their house. Free water!
"If there's a publicly exposed service with no authentication or security in place, it is not the fault of an individual for using it. It's clearly not illegal, and neither is it unethical. If [the city of Rome] wants to protect their [water service] from unauthorized use, they are perfectly capable of doing so."
I disagree that it is not unethical. I would hope most people recognize that abusing a free service to avoid a paid service is unethical.
Your analogy is flawed in that there are likely laws protecting used of the water of that fountain. Not so with an open service on the internet.
Further more, it's not an ocean sized fountain run by a monopolistic corporation and one of the only places to get water, with simple technology to restrict who can get water if the corporation so decided.
> Your analogy is flawed in that there are likely laws protecting used of the water of that fountain. Not so with an open service on the internet.
All analogies are flawed. I would hope the difference between something being ethical and unethical is more than just a law.
Again... abusing a free service to avoid a paid service is (usually) unethical and dishonest, regardless of legality. Doesn't matter if you are plumbing your house with public water intended for tourists, filling your backpack with all the honey packets from all the Chick-Fil-A's so you never have to buy honey again, or buying hundreds of thousands of dollars of $1 coins from the government with credit cards so you can profit off of taxpayers. It's abuse of a free service, and it's unethical.
It's only unethical if you strongly support the current economic policies and incentive structures for large corporations. I and many others do not. They do not deserve the tax perks and monopolies granted them and their banker financiers that let them build so much wealth on the backs of the lower classes.
Also, why don't they just protect their endpoints with authentication? It would be simple. They choose not to. There is not an easy way to protect public water or Chick-fil-A honey packets, so ethics is the main mechanism. Not so with internet services. There are countless well tested mechanisms for this.
"endpoints with authentication" -- Because you don't have to login to watch YouTube...
It's not easy to block third party access, it often ends up being a whack-a-mole style game where you block it and then they just get in using a different method. YouTube already has been doing this.
On top of this you are taking money from the creators of the content, not just YouTube itself and violating their terms of service.
If a service tells you not to do it, and you still do it anyway it's quite clear you are being unethical.
Whether a corporation tells people to do something or not is not a direct mapping to whether something is ethical or not.
It wouldn't be wack-a-mole if they just had proper authentication instead of using the freemium model. It's their choice to open up their APIs to unauthenticated anonymous users due to their shady advertising revenue model, and the costs are calculated in their models.
BTW, I've never once read or signed any agreement with YouTube, so I have no idea what you are talking about when you say "the service tells you not to do it".
Even if there was more prominent messaging of the sort, it's not the job of the user to twist themselves in knots to assist wealthy rent seekers' desires to apply ancient business models based on physical property to modern information systems.
I see you chose to ignore part of my reply mentioning the creators you are taking content from without paying. YouTube does not care as much, but the creators are the ones hurt the most, not YouTube.
This points more to a problem with the monopolistic walled garden rather than the user. It's like saying a slave won't have food if you shoot the slave owner.
I actually think you raise a very fair point and believe you have some merit to what you believe in.
I will admit that I am not very fond of YouTube either. They have far to much control over the income source of a good amount of people. They could on a whim take away the monetization of a channel (which they do sometimes) and cause them a lot of financial strain.
In terms of your slave comparison I would say a better comparison would be if the slave owner was doing poorly the conditions the slave lives in are worsened. This highlights that the slave does not have much chances to acquire food on their own. I wish there was more competition but I do not believe starving the slave of the system fixes the owner of the system.
I definitely agree with that however I feel like the barrier to entry to non-technical folks is too high. And then the second problem being that people go where the content is, and the content doesn't want to go somewhere without people. The classic new social media problem.
And if you want to support the creator and not get ads, there's Youtube Premium. I often hear "I'd rather pay a small amount and not get ads", but when provided with that, they then resort to some other excuse to still use ad-block.
Its not stealing because stealing is taking something from someone. When you view video online you are copying video not moving it.
What about ad blocking? Well you aren't actually blocking ads. You're electing not to request ads. I'm simply not interested in ads. It would be wrong for YouTube to sell my views to advertisers since I would just ignore the ads anyways. So basically they are actually the bad guy and I'm a hero.
Re: alternatives, the guys that make stuff I like I support through patreon / gumroad / PayPal / mail gifts directly to their PO box. Some of them host their own videos. Its cheap.
On the flipside the crap made that's supported by advertising is terrible - drawn out for revenue, totally soulless and generally for children. Who cares about that?
The argument is that there is a clear Quid Pro Quo here: you can use Google's expansive infrastructure[1]/bandwidth to obtain video content if you watch their ads or pay for Premium. Although Google hasn't banned people for blocking them, they have every right not to serve videos to you if you don't want to watch the ads.
The web is a request response model. I'm not blocking ads I'm merely choosing not to request them. The idea that I owe them 5 seconds of feigned interest so they can mislead their clients with fake numbers is mental gymnastics
The technical process doesn't matter; they'd be entirely within their rights if they only sent your client a "watch token" after the 5/15/30 seconds it takes for you to watch an Ad. You don't owe them anything as long as you're fine getting nothing in return. The only reason they don't do such thing is because they know a large amount of people watch with blocked ads (blocked, as in preventing Google from getting your client to show ads) and doing so would destroy brand reputation and PR.
If you set up a Google Family (or whatever it's called) of 6 and just pay for the subscription it ends up costing like $3/month for YouTube Red. Been doing this for 5 years and just have my family pay me their share at the beginning of the year.
It's not about virtue, is about you getting a service, and paying something in return. If you don't want to pay with your attention, you have the option of getting Youtube Premium and paying with your wallet insted.
I have no problem with paying for a service with money.
I do have a problem in paying for it with my data.
If the content creator wants my money for their service, they'll provide a way for me to purchase it without having to use an intermediate surveillance company.
Since I block the surveillance company by default, the content creator is not at a loss from me consuming their content without ads - for I simply would not be consuming their content at all otherwise.
OTOH, the creator may benefit from me viewing their content because I may find it interesting and recommend it to a bunch of other people, who don't have the same privacy concerns as me.
The Youtube ad model is probably not long-term sustainable. Content creators should be looking to find alternative delivery methods based on pay-per-view, or freemium subscriptions to get people engaged. You'll find many already do, as they have patreon pages in addition to their youtube, but patreon is also a surveillance company, so that's not an option for me either.
I don't mind paying for things with Bitcoin. Any content creator can accept money without requiring me to sign up to work for a surveillance company.
I'm sorry but it's a little jarring how you don't even acknowledge that Youtube is a service as part of the equation. You speak about the "content creator" providing you with a service, but fully take the platform on which it happens for granted.
If you don't want to feed the "Surveillance company", then don't use Youtube at all. But it is quite arrogant to benefit from their work, acting entitled to it, and then turn around and shit all over them behind their back.
I do acknowledge that Youtube is a service provider as well as a surveillance company, but I don't agree with the terms on which they operate, so I elect not to use all of their service.
I'm not "entitled" to anything, but the content is accessible to me without being spied on, so this is the way I will consume it until the creator uses an alternative, non-surveillance company to distribute their content.
The onus is on the content creator to provide the alternative - not force me to be spied on.
But again, hidden behind that is indeed an air of entitlement. It implies that you are owed content from the creator, and if the creator decides to put it on Youtube, then they are giving away their rights to be compensated by you. And you still don't really acknowledge that what Youtube (not the creator) is providing you should be compensated either.
If you found a shortcut for getting food from a store without paying (let's say a big store like Walmart or McDonalds), do you think it's a fine thing to do? Do you think it's ethical to get the hard work of others for free, just because the company providing said work is rich?
It's nothing to do with Google being rich - it's about them running an unethical business model of spying on people and selling catalogues of their behavior without their full knowledge or necessarily their consent. (Let's admit, this model relies on the vast majority being naive about data collection and sharing practices.)
The entitlement is actually from Google et al. They think they're entitled to aggregate your data simply because you visit their web page - but we know that the internet does not necessarily work that way, and an ad blocker can thwart their efforts.
I don't think I am entitled to other people's content, but I can access it - that's what happens when you put things in a public space like the internet. The content creator is fully aware that some people are going to block ads and they still upload it anyway. Perhaps they get more viewers by making their content public rather than hiding it behind a paywall?
The store comparison does not work because there is a deprivation of a physical product involved. No deprivation occurs with digital data which can be cloned an infinite number of times. You might argue that you are depriving the provider of bandwidth, but they have elected to make something public with the understanding that they may not be compensated for that bandwidth.
The surveillance business model is only sustainable for as long as people are willing to give up their data in exchange for services. If they are not willing, then Google et al will have to find a new business model. They aren't entitled to your data just because they've made some content publicly accessible and you have chosen to access it whilst maintaining your own privacy.
Perhaps there will be other options for monetization of content other than the surveillance-company-masked-as-advertiser model. Where you can pay for stuff without giving up your privacy.
I use Vanced and if I recall correctly, NewPipe doesn't port your YouTube playlists over. I save music to playlists so not having that feature would've been a huge pain.
it seems to be a great app. gonna be a big conscience challenge for me though. I always feel that my guilt of blocking ads on desktop can be compensated by allowing ads on mobile... (i know it's hypocrisy to most ppls opinion)
Is anyone familiar with youtube.videodeck.net / pockettube? Aggregates channels into subscription columns like RSS. Like old youtube collections. I've been using the service for years and have yet to see anyone else replicate the feature.
I'm not familiar with your examples, but NewPipe allows you to group your subscriptions and then show the latest videos from each group, sorted by upload date/time (or something similar).
What it misses from a usual RSS reader is the notifications (idk maybe they exist and you only have to turn them on) and the "read"/"viewed" marker.
F-droid is an alternative App Store, dedicated to open source software.
You have to enable installing apps from "unknown sources" (an option available in the Android menus, no root required), then install the Fdroid application, and from now on you can revert back the "unknown sources" setting, and use Fdroid to search and install FOSS apps, including NewPipe.
On newer Android versions (8+), you have to allow the specific app from which the install is launched (browser, file manager, third party store, ...). In practice, not that different.
I really wonder why so many innocuous, on-topic comments about NewPipe are being downvoted in this thread. Are YouTube employees raiding HN or something? /s
NewPipe is a great app, lighter on system resources than the official YouTube app, free & open-source, and a joy to use especially if you're overwhelmed by the serious UI "bloat" that YouTube has been suffering from in recent years. In addition to being ad-free, in many other ways is it a superior video-viewing experience.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
(Disclaimer: I'm not a YouTube/Google employee, just someone who cares a lot about preserving the quality of discussion HN is known for.)
It may be mistaken on HN, but all social media companies are gamed by corporations, political parties, foreign governments, native governments, intelligence agencies, powerful churches, lobby groups, media companies, advertisers.
Downvoted this for complaining about downvotes, breaking site guidelines (oh, not only that, it combines snark and insinuation about astroturfing too). Votes swing a lot, so when more votes come in and previously downvoted comments turn positive, complaints like this just end up as pure noise. Happens all the time.
You need Youtube Premium for that. I have a legacy Google Play Music subscription and sometimes I feel like my experience vastly different than people without Youtube Premium. I use Youtube enough I'm ok paying to not see ads and play videos with my phone screen off.
Oh they have been very clear about needing youtube premium for that.
I do get it to an extent. If people want to use it as a jukebox. I have spotify and mp3s for that. I want to play videos in the background that don't have actual visual content ("people talking to the camera" style) and google doesn't want that.
Luckily I can use alternatives for nearly all content like this, first and foremost actual RSS podcasts.
As for the experience being very different on premium: I recently had to use YT on a browser without uBlock/uMatrix and I believe I got a taste of that difference. Scary stuff, not sure how people cope with all the shit being thrown at them.
I dont mind paying for the feature but I do mind having google aplication on my phone (which I dont - none).
The trust in google not taking away my contacts, spying on my position, requiring to have their gms on my phone (which will further grab as much of my data they can have) is virtually zero.
If you open YouTube in desktop mode (in the browser) and switch tabs, you can still play the video via the notification manager popup (not sure how it's called, basically when you drag down the top bar, there is still this sticky YouTube notification). This is how you can get free background play without 3rd party apps.
On Firefox for Android for example, the vast majority of video playing sites automatically continue to play in the background. YouTube should, but it has code specifically to check for Firefox tabs being backgrounded and pause the player. So it's going out of its way to disable a feature of the browser. Happily this can be reversed with an extension, but yes, it is an intentional anti-feature. Whether you agree with that business practice is your own judgement.
Personally I think the real value add of Youtube Premium is the ability to offline videos in the official app; that's not something the browser can normally do. Well, and the secondary effect of contributing somewhat to creators, even if the payout isn't significant through that channel. It's nice for it to be automatic and not require an explicit subscription.
Fwiw, the relatively few creators who are talking about it publicly tend to agree that cpm is (much) higher for premium users than users monetized through ads. So if you want creators to get more money, paying for premium is better than watching ads.
This right here is why I maintain my subscription even though I do not run the official app. :) Well, that and I mostly watch YouTube on my desktop with an ad blocker, so creators weren't getting ad impressions from me anyway. I figure that's a fair trade.
> I really wonder why so many innocuous, on-topic comments about NewPipe are being downvoted in this thread. Are YouTube employees raiding HN or something? /s
At this point pretty much all comments saying that this is bypassing paid features are downvoted into oblivion and grayed out, so what exactly are you talking about?
Anything that can be interpreted even the slightest in favor of Google/YouTube is automatically downvoted by the HN mob. If anything, this thread is a prime example of that.
The DRM will get broken if there's enough effort dedicated to it just like every latest movie or TV show somehow ends up on torrent sites despite pretty advanced DRM.
Netflix shows end up on torrent sites in short order, yet youtube-dl doesn't support netflix (contrary to what the name suggests, it supports hundreds of sites besides youtube: https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html)
This is the only app we allow our kids to watch YouTube on. It dispenses with the ads and 90% of the tricks they use to keep you watching (no overlays at the end and no autoplay).
It's nice for listening to music, but a bit cumberstone to use.
I wish:
* the playlist was easily accessible from the left pane drawer
* autoplay was easily toggleable from the playlist view
* the automatically added title wouldn't be a regular title in the playlist before it's played (a bit lower and grayed, and adding items would do so above that title)
* the playlist would show various options for the next automatic title.
I've looked into that. I guess I bit more than I could chew (peertube integration, though now with libtorrent supporting webtorrents, it could be easier).
But nowadays, I don't really want to invest time in the Android ecosystem, especially as I think I'll switch my daily driver to a PinePhone soon enough. The desktop equivalent is freetube, I think.
You can also disable autoplay in the official client.
(and pay for YouTube premium to disable ads; otherwise you're watching videos without contributing back to the people creating them and video hosting/streaming fees)
Youtube might be the only place I actually don't mind ads. Some creators on youtube are extremely good at providing valuable content in short form - I use it primarily as a learning platform, whether I am doing wood work, learning how to fix something at home, or learning about a new topic. I would rather continue to support these creators by watching ads on their own channel than paying for a subscription that covers everything.
It's an invaluable resource and until there's something better taking the ads away takes part of their income away.
Which doesn't cover the cost of video hosting, transcoding and streaming. Or the cost of other software development of YouTube.
If you'd ever work on anything close to video streaming industry you'd find out that the costs of delivering video to the world is massive. And paying for those services is how you make them sustainable (and add competition).
Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV / FireTV? I've tried it several times in the past, and its always been wonky there. I use SmartYouTubeTV (https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/) on AndroidTV right now, and the logged out experience is terrible.