Many YT privacy frontends are down it seems. YouTube is cracking down on these servers fast. Both Invidious and Piped services are not working now.
So how are you watching videos now? Just plain youtube[dot]com with unblock and VPN?
Recently I have been unable to find any working public frontends for YouTube or Instagram. People keep sending me links to content on both. Piped and Invidious servers were still fairly plentiful just a very few weeks ago. Based on what I’ve only just now read here, I’ll try GrayJay for YT. If there’s a good source for persistently updated info on currently-functioning, public-facing Privacy Frontends, please post a link (or keep this thread updated?). Thanks!
Freetube and GrayJay
I’ve had a good experience with GrayJay. It’s a bit young and missing features but it’s never broken for me.
Btw, they also have a desktop app, but it’s currently in beta.
FreeTube is more stable for desktop.
I’ve been using their GrayJay desktop app, and I’ve enjoyed it so far.
I haven’t checked out FreeTube but maybe this is the push I need.
I’ve used it for a few days, but it lacks several fundamental features. Additionally, it’s quite resource-intensive.
I find it runs better then YouTube in Firefox on my crappy laptop
At this point we should just start torrenting YouTube. Like fuck YouTube.
At this point we should just ditch YouTube entirely, but alas.
I kinda assumed Vimeo would step up its social aspects when YouTube started ratcheting up its bullshit. Still waiting.
At this point we should just ditch YouTube entirely, but alas.
YouTube is great for downloading movie rips. They’re out there if you know where to look. When you download a movie on YouTube, you’re legally in the clear: Google is doing the copyright infringement. That’s one big advantage over torrents.
Yeah, but you can get movie rips off other places like archive.org. Also, in the US at least there’s not much of a penalty for consuming pirated content, only if you distribute it. The chance of that even happening is greatly reduced if you use a VPN.
I don’t know where to look. How can I find out?
Here’s how it works: people who want to upload movies on Youtube create innocuous-looking channels, upload 10 or 20 bullshit videos on them for a few months to make them look innocuous, then suddenly upload those big forbidden movies you want. Youtube doesn’t react rightaway - probably because the channels have been rated harmless by the algorithm over the previous months - and for a few hours to a few days, you can download the movies. Then Youtube takes notice of the traffic increase, takes a look and nukes the account. There are a gigantic number of those sleeper accounts waiting to be activated. They’re mostly created in upload farms in asia.
The trick is finding them. It’s a game of cat and mouse between Youtube and the uploaders, and you want to find the mouse before the cat does. For obvious reasons, the movies are rarely labeled exactly what you want (i.e. don’t look for “Dune 2”, you won’t find it). But there are several keywords you can use to at least find some of them, and then you can follow the Youtube suggestions until you spot the thumbnail of the movie you want. It may be called “This guys fights in the desert and wins” for example, but the thumbnail will unmistakably show some collage of Timothy Chalamen against the desert of Arrakis. Then you can use yt-dlp to download it. But do it quick before Youtube kills the channel.
As for the keywords that will take you easily to burner uploader accounts, my favorite ones are “Blockbusters” (or “Blockbuster movies”) for action movies (that will take you quickly to the same plethora of shitty Marvel, John Wick, Jason Stratham, Liam Neeson, Vin Diesel and Mission Impossible rehashes, so if you’re after something a bit more interesting, follow the suggestions) and “Harlock Space Pirate” to find animes. And for 80’s movies (yes, I’m from that time), I look for… “80s movies” 🙂 I usually don’t find what I want, but again, follow the suggestions.
Finally, to throw the Youtube algorithm, most of those poster also post movie snippets with well-known titles. Don’t get bogged down in those: look at long video and dismiss anything shorter than the running length of the movie you’re after. They won’t have the right title but they’ll have the right thumbnail.
Good luck 🙂
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
There re a lot of free Movie channels, tolerated by YT, eg. Movie Dome (but Country restricted German, enough with an Proxie) and also some others in Spanish and English. Another possibility, outside of YT, for free movies live and on demand are Pluto TV and websites of Public TV channels. Free Movies are not a big problem in YT and online, only need to search a little. Alternatives to YT, well, maybe in near future Odysee respect content.
All the links you posted don’t work where I live, unsurprisingly.
And I’m talking big, recent releases, not B-movies from yesteryear: those are actively banned on YT, obviously. You can find them but they’re not supposed to be on YT.
Which links don’t work for you? Download FreeTube and SMplayer Search full movies in your language Watch thes as said Yes, there are also old B-Movies, but not only, I watched a lot of more recent movies, (Venom, Black Adams, Detective Dee, SWAT, Terminator (all), Spy,…) , alo not all older movies are bad (Hell Train (Script by Kurusawa), Speed, Dune 1+2, Most of Star Trek, Prey…). As said, search and you’ll find, there are tons of good free movies online
It works! I typed in “blockbuster” adjusted upload time filter to “today” and started scrolling. Just scroll past anything that is less than 1 h long, and you’ll find movies pretty easily.
Before long, I found a few movies that had very special names like: “Rotten Tomatoes Full Movie | Blockbuster Movie 2025 | Action Movies Hollywood 2025 in English 2160p” or “60’s Sci-fi | The Day Mars Invaded Earth | Full Movie”. I also tried a bunch of other related keywords like: “movie”, “hollywood” and “scifi”. Surprisingly, finding bollywood movies is very easy.
The only problem is that you’ll never know what you’ll find. If you want to watch jurassic park, you could search for “dinosaur movie”, but I couldn’t make that work. Searching by genre seems to work reasonably well, but you need to get creative with the keywords.
When you do find a movie, copy the name into a text file and start collecting these silly names. Pretty soon you’ll notice which words appear frequently, so start searching for those. There’s no single universal word that always works. Here’s are a few words that seems to work for me: Rotten Tomatoes, Full Movie, film, blockbuster, action movie, hollywood, 2160p, adventure, Thriller, mystery movie, free movie
ok.ru/video is better
Well PeerTube is p2p like torrents are (but with a simple streaming web ui), so basically just run PeerTube
I love the idea of PeerTube it works really well the only problem is basically no one uploads to it so most of the people I want to watch just aren’t there.
I’d love to see someone operating some sort of PeerTube instance that basically acts as a temp cache for YT videos.
Like it could just store all the videos that we link-to from Lemmy and autodelete after 1 month.
deleted by creator
Reject inefficient video data transfer. Return to kb sized articles you can analyze at your own pace.
deleted by creator
Close the door, turn off the lights, wear earbuds, pull a duvet over your head. Works every time. Might look a bit suspicious, but at least it’s private.
Seriously though, it’s getting pretty bad. I’m currently shifting my video watching habits away from YT. I have a feeling that sooner rather than later I may have to quit YT completely.
There are several way, honestly. For Android, there’s NewPipe. The app itself fetches the YouTube data. For PC, there are similar applications that do the same such FreeTube. Those are the solutions I recommend.
If you’re one of those, you can also host your own Invidious and/or Piped instances. But I like NewPipe and FeeTube better.
I’ve used freetube for a while and it seems like it’s expierencing the same issues since I’ve been getting a lot of error messages lately.
Really? It’s been working just fine for me.
FreeTube also is based on Invidious instances, changing the instance may work, but better to set the SMplayer as extern player, then you can open the Video in this player which works almost always.
Thank you for the tip. Hopefully that’ll fix the issues I’ve been having.
Yes, if you find a workng Invidious instance it’s ok, but if not, FreeTube without SMplayer is useless.
NewPipe needs VPN or Tor for privacy which usually gets blocked
That really depends on your threat model. The app isn’t monitoring your activity or has imbedded trackers. It pulls content directly from YouTube’s CDN. All they (Google) know is your IP address, but nothing else. For 99.9% of people that’s totally ok.
Just firefox with ublock origin.
i just search it on dukdukgo and use their viewer
I host my own invidious
Is there a good tutorial for doing that?
Their own documentation
Why? That basically means they track you the same, but with lots if extra steps.
Unless you use a VPN and then you’re back to the same problem again.
I am not the full expert on the subject, but I assume the profiling is to a lesser extent. For one you don’t browse within a Google account.
I also like the slimmed down UI and subscription management of invidious compared to yt.
And don’t forget no ads and sponsorblock. Although some add ons like vinegar for safari get you pretty close to uninterrupted viewing.
All said, probably not the best in regards to pure privacy.
Freetube and Grayjay. Grayjay has a desktop app now.
You can still use yt-dlp with most of the invidious instances that are still up, but not displaying the video for some reason. Just copy the URL and use it with yt-dlp from the command line. All still works, sponsor block and all.
On my android phone I use either invidious with seal(yt-dlp wrapper app) or tubular (fork of newpipe with sponsor block).
Freetube has an option to watch videos in a external viewer. I set it to be MPV which I set it to use yt-dlp to download which allows me to customize many things like video and audio quality, subtitles, equalize audio, etc. No need to copy and use the command line.
How do you set this up? Link to guide?
Go to configuration, external player, choose mpv, in custom external player arguments put: --ytdl;–ytdl-format=best audio+bestvideo ( or whatever format you like). For subtitles and equalization you have to download mpv scripts from github.com/stax76/awesome-mpv in the User Script section. There’s a lot of cool scripts there. You have to put the script in the mpv script directory of your OS.
seconding this
FreeTube is a useful project as it allows you to “fallback” on a non-preferred frontend.
https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
This allows you to continue to use Youtube irregardless of which frontend is (potentially not) working.
In ‘Settings > General’ you’ll want to select “Invidious API” as your “Preferred API backend” and specify your favorite invidious instance in the “Current Invidious Instance” field and click “Set Current Instance as Default”. This locks FreeTube into the specified instance.
Then, when you notice that FreeTube is issuing notices to you about your favorite Invidious Instance being down, you can wander back to ‘Settings > General’; hit the “Clear Default Invidious Instance” Button and wait as FreeTube magically contacts the “https://api.invidious.io/” page for you and selects a new, and hopefully online and working Invidious instance. (You may have to hit this button several times to roll a working instance, Hit the button, check the subs page and see if everything loads, repeat if it falls back on the Local API.)
When you run into instances where you can’t roll up a good Invidious instance; the built in Local API is running a NewPipe Extractor like API directly from your FreeTube client. Not the best; but at least it keeps things working while you wait for the Invidious devs to fix things up; and it still reasonably preserves as much of your privacy as it can while doing this to the best effort it can.
…Sadly this doesn’t work when Google manages a double combo of breaking both Invidious and NewPipe; but I have found that this is less often the case and the devs of either project are usually fairly quick about getting fixes out. Bless their hard work with a donation sometime maybe, if you can.
I download the videos I want to watch with yt-dlp. This applies to audio as well. I then add the videos to my Jellyfin server to watch them on the TV.
Grayjay.app
But it requires login when I tried to play some videos on youtube
Check the settings. There should be some to allow restricted videos
Downside is that you’ll have to regularly delete all the videos you’ve downloaded.
Use yt-dlp URL -o - | mpv - This way the video goes directly to mpv without using the disk, avoiding the need to delete. It should work with other viewers as well.
Awesome, works with VLC as well. Thanks.
Another thing that I do is make an alias: alias pvid=“yt-dlp $(xsel -b) -o - | mpv -”. Install xsel first, xsel -b pastes what’s in the clipboard. So you only have to copy the URL and execute pvid, no need to paste. Or even better make an app that executes that command and put it in the taskbar. You only have to click it after copying.
I wrote myself a Chrome add-on that adds a context menu entry to play or download links.
background.js
chrome.runtime.onInstalled.addListener(() => { chrome.contextMenus.create({ id: "processLink", title: "Download as...", contexts: ["link"] }); chrome.contextMenus.create({ id: "720p", parentId: "processLink", title: "720p", contexts: ["link"] }); chrome.contextMenus.create({ id: "music", parentId: "processLink", title: "MP3", contexts: ["link"] }); chrome.contextMenus.create({ id: "maxQual", parentId: "processLink", title: "Maximum quality video", contexts: ["link"] }); chrome.contextMenus.create({ id: "separator1", parentId: "processLink", type: "separator", contexts: ["link"] }); chrome.contextMenus.create({ id: "piQual", parentId: "processLink", title: "30 fps for RPi", contexts: ["link"] }); chrome.contextMenus.create({ id: "separator2", parentId: "processLink", type: "separator", contexts: ["link"] }); chrome.contextMenus.create({ id: "streamLink", parentId: "processLink", title: "Stream to VLC...", contexts: ["link"] }); }); chrome.contextMenus.onClicked.addListener((info, tab) => { let linkUrl = info.linkUrl; if (info.menuItemId === "720p") { sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "video720"); } else if (info.menuItemId === "music") { sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "music"); } else if (info.menuItemId === "maxQual") { sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "videomp4"); } else if (info.menuItemId === "piQual") { sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "video720p30"); } else if (info.menuItemId === "streamLink") { sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "stream"); } }); function sendLinkToNativeApp(link, action) { console.log("Sending link to native app with action:", action, link); chrome.runtime.sendNativeMessage( 'com.example.ytlink_processor', { link: link, action: action }, function(response) { if (chrome.runtime.lastError) { console.error("Error:", chrome.runtime.lastError.message); } else { console.log("Received response from native app:", response.output); } } ); }native_host.py (chatGPT wrote this because I can't Python)
import sys import subprocess import json import struct def log_to_file(message): with open("log.txt", "a") as log_file: log_file.write(message + "\n") def get_message(): raw_length = sys.stdin.read(4) if len(raw_length) == 0: sys.exit(0) message_length = struct.unpack('I', raw_length)[0] message = sys.stdin.read(message_length) return json.loads(message) def send_message(message_content): message = json.dumps(message_content) sys.stdout.write(struct.pack('I', len(message))) sys.stdout.write(message) sys.stdout.flush() def process_link(link, action): if action == "stream": cmd = 'yt-dlp --stream "{}" -o - | "D:/Programme/VLC/vlc.exe" -'.format(link) else: cmd = 'yt-dlp --{} "{}"'.format(action, link) result = subprocess.Popen('start cmd /c "{}"'.format(cmd), shell=True) return result.stdout + result.stderr if __name__ == "__main__": message = get_message() link = message.get("link") action = message.get("action") if link and action: output = process_link(link, action) send_message({"output": output})The actions are just aliases for different qualities (old pi, so 720p60 stutters at times), audio extraction, etc.
Excellent.
