https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe

https://libretube.dev/

https://codeberg.org/NullPointerException/PipePipe

https://github.com/lamarios/clipious

Sometimes videos are not viewable on a specific instance, but this way you can keep all your subscriptions and other settings even when switching to a different instance.

If I understand what you are saying, Piped has this. For example I can stream from instance-1.com but at the same time I'm logged into instance-2.com so that I can keep my favourites and settings. See "Instance" section here https://piped.video/preferences particularly the option "Use a different instance for authentication"

But I moved to libretube now. Newpipe kept throwing up errors when I jumped around a video.

I actually agree with newpipe to some degree. There is very bad sponsorship, and there is light mentions of sponsorship or sponsorship adjacent content. not everything is black or white. Sponsorblock makes it all or nothing (they have different categories but I often disagree with what they put into the categories).

I wish I could turn it on per channel. because some channels I hate the 2 minute long brilliant ads, but on other channels Im fine with a 5 second "we're building this thing using X company parts because X company is sponsoring the video"

I still use it, but i find it just as frustrating as it is helpful sometimes.

Some of it is per channel settings (some channels have way too long of sponsor segments), and some of it is just disagreement about how granular to be (on LTT they cut out the entire segue to the sponsor, and not just the sponsor spot, i dont want the LTT sponsors, but not being serious is their whole thing, I don't mind watching the segues)

That's such a simple and genius idea

What do they mean? They dont even want to provide it as an option?

But anyway I had too many issues with newpipe anyway even the fork.

Innovation requires disruption, which requires competition, which YouTube has none of. If you want long form video content to survive in the medium to long term it needs to be possible to make a living in a diversity of ways and not be dependent on just one provider. So in that sense supporting the existing system only serves to reinforce the failure of long form content, as eventually a system without substantial competition will move to reduce cost and eventually focus only on the more profitable short form content (which is what’s happening).

The current war between YouTube and its users wouldn’t be possible if there were any viable alternatives at all.

I would think if you really cared about long form creators you’d support platforms that paid properly and didn’t keep 45% of their revenues. Even Apple only keeps 30% and they get deeply criticized, but whenever YouTube comes up people come out defend them. And all of this happens before subscription revenue, and it doesn’t include any of the other revenue Google takes off the top like landing page ads, sponsored promotion, etc.

Long form is in danger because of YouTube’s shift towards short form video. We should be pushing for competitors and not allowing them this insanely dominant position to an entire Internet content type.

The problem with YouTube is not that they have ads...it is that the platform sprays for effect while claiming to care about what they are doing when any reasonable user can tell that they are simply flooding the pipes with ad content.

From what I heard, Google’s sells ad space via an auction system. They collect information about a viewer then when said viewer watches a video/visits a website, all the ad space on the video/website goes on auction with the viewer’s characteristics attached in real time. Advertisers will look at the viewer characteristics and decide if they want to bid. The winner of the auction gets the ad spot and has their ad shown. All this is of course fully automated and over in just a few milliseconds.

What this means is, advertisers have full control over what ads you get. Ad space goes to the highest bidder. If you have money, you can spam a specific demographic to death with your ads. Google does not in anyway try to protect the quality of life of its users.

Google’s system is both amazing and disappointing at the same time. It’s an amazingly efficient way to maximize the value of ad space but disappointing in the Google doesn’t do any kind of advance user behavior modeling to see what ads the user would be most receptive to (i.e. would not frustrate the user, high probability of engagement with what’s advertised, …) instead they leave it to the “free market” (i.e. the advertisers) to figure that out.

Maybe the fix is actually to adjust and make the ad lower energy and more bland to target the subliminal more, assuming the online ad networks don't sort themselves out

There are a small set of products that seem to be everywhere for a while, occupying a minority of sponsor segments. But in most sponsor segments I see one-off products that I'll never see again on any channel.

On the rare occasions where they show something that looks really useful to me, I'd have to take a note because it's so unlikely to be a product I will encounter again.

I don't take those notes, so I've seen a lot of great-looking products that I'll never buy due to forgetting they exist by the time they would be useful to me. When I need something I tend to browse for what's available and/or look at reviews with a skeptical eye, as I'm sure many people do.

So the sponsor segments aren't that effective for me. But I wouldn't call them repetitive, except for a few products that come up a lot.

It significantly boosts the signal to noise ratio, and makes YouTube a much better experience.

It's a small data point about the content, so it can sometimes be helpful if I'm trying to decide who to pick amongst forty different 2hr lectures on the same thing.

Also, if you are fine with sponsor spots, you probably would have to also be okay with watching ads, so no adblocking either then.

Because we don't want to be advertised to. There is no need for any further justification.

> I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.

Let them die.

1- Makes good, useful content that I watch often. 2- Doesn't abuse sponsorship sections. Sponsor segment at the beginning of a video? Auto-skip. Half the video is about the sponsor? Auto-skip. Constantly gets sponsorship from spam/fraudy/irrelevant companies? Auto-skip.

For all the channels that doesn't fall into these categories: tough luck.

1. The computer doesn't know whether you skipped the ad, and won't feel bad when you do.

2. The computer does track whether you watch the ad segment, and that information makes it back to the advertiser. Personally, I wouldn't want to support "creators" spying on me in this way.

In either case, the creator has no costs for you watching, and youtube has lower costs if you skip the sponsored segment. If you choose not to watch the video in the first place, it can only hurt their sponsorship.

I'm pretty sure the youtuber gets money from google for views even if you don't view their sponsored content section (if someone knows better please let me know) and Google makes money by collecting data on what you watch, how often, when, using what device, from what IP address, etc.

I think it's one of those things like shoes... Nobody thinks they need shoes till they try them, and then they tend to wear them all the time.

There is no good reason to force ads on anyone. I dont care if the creator needs to make a living out of youtube. Thats their problem and they should use stuff like patreon instead.

One example that comes to mind is how a lot of financial creators pushed crypto products.

If they use ads they will block.

If they ask for payment they will pirate.

Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with

There is a whole galaxy of content creators who make great stuff but clearly aren’t making a living directly off content.

People like making content for tons of reasons.

If the price & convenience is right, a significant chunk (enough to offset the impact of freeloaders) will pay.

Movie piracy used to be the norm before Netflix came along, yet movies were still made.

Music piracy was the same until Spotify came along, yet there's more music than ever being produced.

The vast majority of people do not pirate, and most people who pay would probably find piracy unethical to begin with.

I would be happy to see a serious study about this. What you call piracy has been the norm for centuries and millenia for spreading culture and reinterpreting music/shows produced by other people.

In the vast majority of the world (including in the global north), the budget you have for culture is low (if any) and when you have people with a computer, copying stuff is very common. For example El Paquete in Cuba was well documented, but even growing up in France i remember so many examples of just sharing with friends (before the Internet but still).

Even for the newer generations, Youtube & Spotify started as pirate services hosting a myriad of copyrighted content. I don't know about Spotify, but i still see people watching whole movies/shows pirated on Youtube rather often when going to places with shared computers.

Sharing is the norm. Restricting sharing is delusional desire for control. Still, it's important that people making art & science make a living, although it's not just them who need to make a living in this crazy world and we'd be all better off with UBI or abolition of private property (one can dream). So you may find it interesting that HADOPI, the law that criminalized non-profit file-sharing in France actually ordered a study on piracy and media consumption back in the early 2010s, and their own study acknowledged that there was no economic loss from piracy (as people don't reduce their budget due to pirating) and the bigger pirates were also the bigger buyers.

I dare you to find a single person who "does not pirate" in any sense of the world and actively respects copyright laws. If only, someone who doesn't sing "happy birthday" song because that's actually copyright infringement. Or doesn't watch music videos on Youtube because they might be pirated. I bet that person doesn't exist, or at least that they are not the "vast majority".

If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns. This was and is rarely the case. I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.

Piracy doesn't always hurt creators, and often it helps them make money. The people who pirate the most, also spend the most money on the things they pirate (https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-valuable-customers-not-...). Just because something is pirated that does not mean there was a loss of income for the creator. I've pirated things and enjoyed them enough that I purchased them later, and I've purchased physical copies of things and later pirated digital copies. I've also pirated things I'd never have purchased at all which means there was never any chance of any of my money going to the creator.

The vast majority of people today pirate all the time. Posting a meme that contains a copyrighted character or image, or listening to a song on youtube from anything other than an official channel, sharing a webcomic over social media, creating a GIF from a movie or TV show, streaming a video game playthrough, and downloading a youtube video to edit into a reaction video are all technically violations of copyright law. Copyright law is so draconian that what most people consider totally normal activities online are violations.

> I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.

I agree that creators have a right for a chance at payment for their work. I disagree that I have no right to choose how to consume that content. Most of the restrictions on how media is intended to be consumed comes from the corporations who own the copyright and not the creators themselves.

When creators make it known that they want their content consumed in a certain way I'll take it into consideration. Musicians who ask that you only ever listen to their albums in their entirety and never listen to a single track I ignore. When Dave Chappelle asked fans to not watch Chappelle's Show I agreed and didn't.

Most authors write books without making any money for years. They write because they enjoy writing. Not because they need it to make a living. So your statement is easily invalidated by reality

Open source is literally proof of this. I make software in my free time simply because I enjoy it. I publish it out there in a variety of licenses with zero expectations. I got a GitHub Sponsors profile with zero sponsors and I'm not even mad about it.

Really great app for that purpose, although I will say I just used ReVanced for general YouTube browsing on my phone.

This is a live stream I just watched to check that it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYDqZQpim8

It's a water pool in the Namib desert, so safe for work

There is SmartTubeNext with ad/sponsor block and most importantly it let's you remove shorts, news, games, music, transmissions. And it is open source.

[1]: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/

What might be useful is some way to use PeerTube distribution on any .mp4 file. Peertube is only a caching system, not a replicated hosting system like BitTorrent. You have to host one copy of the file somewhere. You should be able to put that master copy on any low-end web server, generate a Peertube URL for it, and let Peertube spool it out. Peertube works by mooching bandwidth off the people watching, so as viewership goes up, so do serving resources.

Link: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junkfood.seal/

The platform support is implemented inside "plugins" and they are under AGPL-3.0, so… can you even distribute the application, considering that the licence of the application and plugins seem to be incompatible at my non-lawyer first glance?

Their excuse for their application licence so that they can legally prevent people from uploading ad-infested versions in Google Play and similar platforms under their name… but that's why MPL 2.0 and Apache 2.0 have trademark exclusion clauses.

Well done NewPipe, you're showing how web applications should be done.

Let's use some assumptions to get to a number.

1. Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.

2. We know that YouTube's share in the overall revenue of Alphabet was 10.5%. Let's assume that all of Alphabet's properties were proportionately profitable (highly incorrect assumption). If the properties were proportionately profitable, YouTube's would have bought in a net income of 5.75 bn.

3. In the past it has been reported that YouTube has been breakeven from a profitability perspective.

This means that YouTube's net profit is in the range of 0 to 5bn USD. This is at best a gross profit margin of 17% which is not good for an internet services company.

I strongly believe technology like NewPipe should exist and companies shouldn't push for more DRM. But end users should not misuse open technologies so much so that companies end up with no other option but E2E encryption for video.

I think it'd only work as a near seamless ui experience and not actually using torrents or any extra setup or complications. Probably branded a bit differently.

Maybe some type of appliance one could run out of their home to buy in or something? But a lot of home users have terrible upload or no internet at all.

Peertube is great but could never keep up with the sheer volume of data uploaded to YouTube.

Arent these goals one and the same?

Profit maximization is required under a capitalist system. By optimizig bandwidth expenses, you are achieving profit maximization.

That’s a very poor and totally off assumption to start with, and makes it seem like YouTube is extremely generous. I’d guess YouTube shares, at best, 20% of the ad revenue with the content creator.

https://www.yrcharisma.com/the-youtube-revenue-split-who-kee...

It's technically a personal video-watching app, not a Youtube app, which you're supposed to link with your own personal video server, but the server APIs it is compatible with are the same APIs that are exposed by Invidious and Newpipe instances. This is not a coincidence.

I'm sure Apple is going to delist it from the App Store at some point (App Store guidelines are just that, guidelines, and there's no getting around them with a weird loophole like you can do with actual laws), but it works for now.

Hence F-Droid, which cannot exist on iOS.

E.g. Minecraft, mrbeast, etc

I want my kids to watch something other than their hundredth Minecraft walkthrough, screaming YouTuber video..

I want them to explore on their own, including online content.

I just want the topics for videos to be more diverse.

One thing to note is that the Google export for Youtube is completely broken and I've been manually importing subscriptions.

Like a RSS with a channel list containing channels like Jeff Geerling, Code to the Moon, Jon Gjengset, Everyday Astronaut and the like?

Absolutely every time I'll start with a song, and 3 next videos after, I'll be facing a 10 hour long version of the same fkng song, if not a loop of the same 2 or 3 videos.

(2022)

Some previous discussion last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449570

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629

https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_u...

https://github.com/revanced

- It's also not as though you're upvoting/liking videos other than theirs, so they won't rank lower because you didn't support them.

- I'm sure the folks at google figured out that watching a video is already a sign of the content being interesting. When using the official (web) player, it clearly uses this to generate recommendations (to many people's frustration)

- You can always share videos with friends or on Mastodon etc. where appropriate, that draws more eyeballs than a passive thumbs up button anyway and thus helps the creator more

The math doesn't work like that—if you can't Like any videos, then all of the videos you watch have an infinitesimally smaller Liked ratio and count than they would if you could. Any given video isn't competing with all the other videos you watch, it's competing with all the other videos anywhere on the site.

I’m sure they’d rather you watch the ads or pay for premium.

[1] https://grayjay.app/

[2] https://futo.org/

Another use case is downloading music I like. I used YouTube for music discovery an ingestion. Now after I find something good I go to NewPipe and dowlnoad it as local audio file and enjoy it like it's good old times of napster and mp3-s.

GrayJay is a new contender on the block that might be worth looking at too.

There's a real parallel between the two. Streaming killed piracy for a while because the service was easy and convenient, with everything in one place. Then, streaming added more and more ads all while it became more fragmented. Now if you pay for a service, you will still see ads, and you have an increasingly limited catalog (even on Youtube, as creators move extra content on Nebula or Patreon)

The more Youtube squeezes and pushes ads, the more demand there will be for adblockers.

I guess that only abundance of devices without DRM is stopping this scenario.

For mid-stream ads, that doesn't work. You could pre-fetch the ad and surrounding video early, so that you can watch buffered content while the server thinks an ad is playing.

Widevine already exists and is increasingly difficult to crack, especially the key levels required for 4k content.

> encoded ads

Only a matter of time before hardware encoders can do this on the fly

That's not the endgame -- Digg:Reddit::YouTube:Vimeo is the end game, IMHO.

I mind paying to get the privilege my data exploited.

I mind paying to a company that use its infinite bags of money to outspend any competition unfairly.

I mind paying after getting blackmailed to accept a new deal when they made sure they left no other choice in the market.

I mind paying for a service that is optimized for "engagement" instead of my own well-being.

I mind paying to a company that doesn't know the time to stop growing and wants to crawl into every aspect of my life.

> I mind paying to a company that doesn't know the time to stop growing and wants to crawl into every aspect of my life.

It's worth recognising that as an ad-supported service, YouTube has an incentive to maximise the watch-time of its users and that this incentive goes away when a user starts paying monthly. But until they begin to earn more from subscriptions than ads I can't see how this changes. Maybe there's a universe in which the adblock crackdown actually incentivises YouTube to stop cramming cheap ad-friendly content down our throats and becomes a platform for actual high-quality content.

And I mind that paying forces me to give my credit card to a companies that have proven to work against me.

I mind that google will take over my entire phone if I connect to any service with a google account because I paid for it and not just login to that single service.

I mind that it will collect all that data if I don't have an adblocker anyway, just not show me ad, and then give it to gov entities (see PRISM).

What I don't mind is paying. I pay for spotify, for neflix, for dynalist, for kagi, for chatgpt, for codepilot, for github...

But I do mind that many people like you on HN accuses us of being dishonest.

What I don't see, is me paying for the worse service.

Youtube Premium is 12.99€ a month for me. For that small price I get to create a Google Account, accept their TOS, let them track and profile me, keep logging in everywhere (because I delete all local storage in the browser routinely) and replace the small and efficient NewPipe with the Youtube app. Futhermore I cannot download a video now and play it next month without connecting to the internet, or move it to my small dedicated video player that doesn't even have connection to the internet.

What is Googles CPM (revenue per 1000 clicks)? I don't think it comes down to more the a low cent amount. I do not watch enough video to justify the price of premium and I will never watch ads, because those are psychological warfare and completely underregulated...

If Google and all the others make a nice micro payment platform for the browser, which work anonymously and without much hassle, I will by all means pay them the amount of money which me watching the ads would have generated plus 10% service fee since they build the platform.

But not like this!

* Yes, it does cost them money to serve and store videos, and no that doesn't disappear with scale. YouTube ingests hundreds of thousands of hours of video a day, and chances are every single video is on at least 2 continents at any given time. They don't get some insane volume price on the enterprise HDDs they use.

There is nothing there forcing me to watch the ads, or that forces the user agent (aka the browser) to behave in the way that server running the application wishes to.

Regarding morals I don't don't care. Not worth a discussion :)

https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

Even if you don't think you have to follow them, they can still ban you for not following their terms, or not agreeing to them. They are not under an obligation to serve you video unauthenticated and/or without receiving what they expect to receive in return (agreeing to their terms and thus paying via ads or money).

YouTube pops up everywhere, on every system I use. Sometimes I'm sitting down to watch something longer, even a movie, but often it's just links from friends or coworkers, or from news articles on Reddit or Hacker News. Sometimes it's lessons, sometimes it's breaking news, sometimes it's 5-second meme videos. I use it at work and at home. I might be on my wife's iPad, or my work phone, or some library computer.

I'm not viewing all those videos on my personal devices logged in using my own personal account. I don't feel comfortable logging in with my personal account everywhere.

And there's something especially annoying about constantly seeing ads on a service I'm paying for.

On top of that, logging in everywhere lets Google track everything I view--every random Reddit click--and Google's the single biggest data collector & exploiter I know. I'm paying them to let them track me.

All told, paying for YouTube feels kinda icky in a way that paying for Netflix does not. I do pay for YouTube Premium, but I still prefer to watch videos without logging in, (ed:) with an adblocker.

Around two years ago I wanted to watch Squid Game on my MacBook Pro + external 4k monitor, and iirc still couldn’t get it working in 4k after various yak shaving. Perhaps it’s now supported, but it felt pretty ridiculous to me that I can’t even access the full service I’m paying for.

I do pay for Patreon and Nebula. But Google will never get a cent from me.

Or the videos aren't that high quality, and are just barely at the level of value where people feel like the time spent watching (or leaving it on as background noise) was worth it, but not at the level of value where time spent+ads or money are worth it.

Like I've watched a LTT video before. I suppose I was very bored. Would I ever pay to watch it? No. Do I even think it was worth the time I spent watching? Probably not. It's like listening to some stranger at the pub tell a story. You might listen if it's interesting, but you probably wouldn't pay them for it.

There's tons of low quality, low effort stuff on there like vlogs, clean/cook/shop with me, hauls, etc. It's a hobby for the creator. People don't want to pay for it because it's not worth anything.

I’d prefer to pay like $5. I don’t need YouTube music.

https://9to5google.com/2023/09/26/youtube-premium-lite-shut-...

Any other platform not only needs to offer cheap/free video hosting, but also send tons of users content similar to their interests in a way that enables new and up-and-coming creators to grow, and it needs to provide a way to pay out those creators, or there's a negative incentive to send any viewers to the other platform that strictly makes them no money.

I spend a lot of money at Bandcamp because in exchange I get bits that I do what I want with. For some reason that's not as popular for video, but it would solve this issue pretty well.

They want to choke that? May as well tell the wind to stop blowing.