Moving away from Google. I just added my fav subs into my rss feed but that isn’t an enough to get good recs. What else can one do? Alternative front ends that work?
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Freetube on Linux, newpipe on android and maybe a private invidious instance.
I use YT-DLP to scrip the download of vids I want to watch and it drops them into Plex for me. I set it to run every 4 hours.
Oooh, this is interesting! How do you get the script to get latest videos from your subscribers?
Can’t speak to his method, but the jellyfin media sever has a YouTube plugin called Fintube that uses the above downloader to integrate YouTube content.
Interesting, wonder if I can do something similar with Plex
I just moved over to jellyfin from plex. I highly recommend it. It’s way more streamlined and active than plex, with a seriously good plugin community. No investor based bloat.
The only issue I had was that jellyfin would crash on scanning my very old music library, where plex would not. To fix it, I used musicbrainz picard to correctly add idv3 tags and remove illegal characters from song names. Now, its smooth as silk.
All the plugin talk about jellyfin makes me want to switch wish Plex kept support for them. Jellyfin does seem to make way bigger strides than Plex these days
Honestly, you should swap. They have tons of excellent plugins.. The intro skip alone is way better than Plex’s.
The end user clients are very solid too. Their kodi client alone is leagues ahead of the plex community one.
The only feature that plex has over jellyfin at this point in my mind is sharing content easy with people out of your home network. With Jellyfin you need to setup your own certs or reverse proxy like SWAG, or use something like tailscale.
Yea I also believe (could be wrong) the Sonic analysis for music and Plex amp is much better than what finamp provides
Edit: I did run both about a year ago just to see the differences so it would not be hard for me to spin it back up
Edit 2: prob going to because I want to test the YouTube and twitch plugins tbh
I just tried this on an Ultra.cc seedbox with yt-dlp installed, and the Fintube plugin configured to the right path for that, yet when I go to Dashboard > Fintube and click the Submit button to add a video to the download, nothing happens. Can’t figure out what’s wrong.
Maybe Jellyfin doesn’t have the necessary write permissions to write the file to that folder, but I’m not quite sure how to change those on such a seedbox, if that’s the case.
Any experience with this to share? Would the Submit button usually lead to a different view, or does it just stay on that video submission screen while the download happens silently in the background? The lack of action I experience when clicking it feels a bit awkward…
So there’s 2 files that go along with the main script: a config file and a download list.
The download list file is literally a list of YT channel URLs and any time I want it to get new channels, I add to the list. Conversely if I get tired of watching a channel, I comment it out or just delete it. YT-DLP just traverses the list.
The config is where the magic happens. That dictates how the file is named, quality you download at, location it’s saved to, format, etc. You can incorporate SponsorBlock which is awesome and even DeArrow has an integration. I enjoy the logging feature so it doesn’t re-download vids it’s already snagged. Generally I’ll tell it to get every video from a channel that’s been posted in the last 15 days.
My destination for the files is a YouTube library folder I set up in Plex. Plex sees it just as another TV-like library and it pulls the metadata from the files, which are embedded by YT-DLP.
Hope this helps!
Very helpful! Thank you so much!
You got it. Good luck!
Grayjay
Does it just stop playing sometimes? It’s the only thing I don’t like about it so far
Not foss
I didn’t say it was, I’m just answering the dude’s question
I use a private Piped instance
Can you show your docker-compose? I’ve tried several times without succeeding 🤧
You can’t just ask that. Not without at least taking them out to a fancy dinner first. Maybe a little dancing.
My bad 😁
Before anything, you’ll want to create a folder for the unix socket:
mkdir /var/run/ytproxyand chown it to your reverse proxy’s user and group.The Docker files:
compose.yml
services: piped-frontend: image: 1337kavin/piped-frontend:latest container_name: piped-frontend environment: BACKEND_HOSTNAME: $API_ENDPOINT depends_on: - piped restart: unless-stopped networks: - proxy piped-proxy: image: 1337kavin/piped-proxy:latest container_name: piped-proxy environment: - UDS=1 volumes: - /var/run/ytproxy:/app/socket # unix socket location user: 1000:1000 restart: unless-stopped networks: - proxy piped: image: 1337kavin/piped:latest container_name: piped-backend volumes: - ./piped/config/config.properties:/app/config.properties:ro depends_on: - piped-db restart: unless-stopped networks: - backend_piped - proxy piped-db: image: pgautoupgrade/pgautoupgrade:16-alpine container_name: piped-db environment: - POSTGRES_DB=$DB_NAME - POSTGRES_USER=$DB_USER - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$DB_PASS volumes: - ./piped/pgdb:/var/lib/postgresql/data restart: unless-stopped networks: - backend_piped networks: backend_piped: proxy: external: true.env
API_ENDPOINT= # no scheme prefix (ex. pipedapi.domain.example) DB_NAME= DB_USER= DB_PASS=To configure the reverse proxy (I use nginx), you can use Piped’s recommended files with your domains. The linked repo also contains a template for the required
config.properties.Let me know if you run into issues, I’ll be glad to help 🙂
I just watch it on youtube.com without logging in. Sacrificing convenience and using some frontend that only work if you pray hard is not something I want to do daily-drive
I use containers on Firefox to sandbox YouTube, and then have a throwaway account that’s literally just for YouTube and nothing else. Everywhere else on the web, scripts from Google are blacklisted using uBO.
There are some periods where YouTube make changes frequently so that e.g. FreeTube stops working for some time, but for the most part it works reliably well. I would say it provides a much better convenience than watching on youtube.com logged out, as you have profiles, subscriptions, playlist and history. Including adblock, sponsorblock and dearrow, and granular control over what to show or not (comments, shorts, live etc.).
Self-hosted Invidious or public Invidious instances.
NewPipe on my phone. I don’t have PC I can use rn but when I used to have one I’d just use my browser (mainly Firefox) with ublock origin to watch YouTube (without signing in).
Freetube on desktop works beautifully. They just added playlists too
This is awesome!
on the minus side, it’s electron and it doesn’t have tabs, but it’s a rather minor inconvenience for me
Do your subscriptions load well? I just imported mine from freshrss and they’re loading slowly
A couple seconds does it… I have 56 subscribed channels though, that’s not a lot, perhaps loading times scale with this number
Hmm maybe I’ll reinstall. Never loading for me. I can click individual but not all subs
You can check the tracker for open issues, see if you’re encountering a known one
grayjay, it’s an app developed by Louis Rossman to combine a lot of streaming platforms into one privacy and security respecting app. it does have billionaire backing tho if that yanks your chain
+1 on Grayjay. Also Tubular. FreeTube on PC and SmartTube on TV.
Thanks! I’ll check it out. Thanks for yanking my chain
ofc!
NewPipe or PipePipe.
Been using PipePipe for awhile now and love it. Unfortunately, recently it has not been able to load playlists 9/10 times. Very frustrating. Hopefully it gets a patch soon.
Any problems I’ve had with these apps has usually been solved by reconnecting my VPN.
I don’t have a VPN.
With invidious and in FreshRSS I use the youtube extension to use the embedded video player, you just need update this part of the code https://github.com/FreshRSS/Extensions/blob/master/xExtension-YouTube/extension.php#L153-L163
It easy just to replace for this:public function getHtmlContentForLink(FreshRSS_Entry $entry, string $link): string { $domain = 'www.youtube.com'; if ($this->useNoCookie) { $domain = 'www.youtube-nocookie.com'; } $domain = 'invidious.personal.com'; $params = 'quality=dash'; $url = str_replace('//www.youtube.com/watch?v=', '//'.$domain.'/embed/', $link); $url = str_replace('http://', 'https://', $url); $url = $url . '?' . $params; return $this->getHtml($entry, $url); }The only change is to use
$domain = 'invidious.personal.com';
And add the parameterquality=dashSeems there’s also this one https://github.com/tunbridgep/freshrss-invidious
but haven’t tried itI use a self-hosted invidious instance, and despite the recent issues with Google trying to block them mine works behind Mullvad VPN.
I use the web app on desktop, and Yattee client on my phone/ipad
youtube-local over a Mullvad (other services like Proton or IVPN are great as well) works really well for me
Grayjay on my Android phone. I like that it supports a lot of different services, and I have subs on Odysee, Rumble, and Nebula (I pay for a sub there). I sometimes download videos for offline use if I’m going to listen on my commute or something (no point in using up data if I don’t need to).
On my desktop/laptop, I just use YouTube directly w/ uBlock Origin on Firefox (to block ads) without logging in. I don’t watch much YouTube on my desktop/laptop, and when I do, I’ll just look for a specific video or whatever.
I also have NewPipe installed on my phone for when I want to find something specific (i.e. background music or something), because Grayjay’s search kind of sucks.
Not Foss so if that’s something that matters to you I would recommend you look elsewhere
Grayjay is source available, which is better than nothing. I’d prefer FOSS, but the features make up for the poor choice of license.
So is Windows XP
That doesn’t mean much
It’s really not. Windows XP had its source leaked, it’s not source available. Grayjay is source available, so I can see every new commit before it hits my phone. That’s a pretty big difference, and it’s the most important when it comes to public security audits.
You aren’t legally allowed to do anything about a bad commit so it is meaningless
That doesn’t follow. If there’s a bad commit in Windows 10 or 11, I won’t even know about it. If there’s a bad commit in Grayjay, I can:
- not upgrade, or downgrade to an unaffected version
- report the issue on their issue tracker
- technically violate the license by patching it myself and building my own copy (probably fine provided I don’t distribute changes)
I can do exactly none of that with most proprietary software, so this source-available license is much better than those. Again, it’s not ideal, but considering it the same as every other proprietary software license is absurd.
I don’t watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.
