With Reddit shutting down its API setting a precedent in the corporate tech world (and Reddit was a major outlier in that a ton of their users are technical minded and support third party clients, YouTube does not have that kind of userbase and will not get backlash for it), Twitter doing whatever the fuck they’re doing, and Google already hellbent on destroying ad blockers, the days of Newpipe, Invidious, and Freetube are numbered. Wouldn’t be surprised if they implement Netflix level DRM tomorrow that makes alt clients impossible. I say savour your alt clients while you can guys, you won’t be able to soon.
Nah, we’ll just switch to webscraping if APIs get locked behind a paywall. Let’s see how those sites handle it when millions of people are using a scraping based client in the future. I can imagine it feeling a lot like being the victim a relentless ddos attack.
This is exactly what the proposed Web Integrity API seeks to prevent. That’s what makes it terrifying.
Show me me a 10ft wall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.
No matter what they try, there will always be someone that manages to completely bypass those bullshit blocks.
Hmm, so no API, no scraping, nothing but some ad infested privacy invading unusable mess. I guess isolating from the whole web is becoming an increasingly appealing option.
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Nooo, I just recently discovered NewPipe 😔
At this point maybe we should all just make onion sites popular I mean isn’t the majority of the internet down there anyways? Fuck YouTube, Facebook,(enter clear net greedy company here) shit keeps getting worse.
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Google isn’t going to kill YouTube’s API any time soon. It’s how billions of videos are viewable in apps and pages across the internet. They make far more money on that than any lost revenue by people using third party apps. Shutting down API access would be one of the most impactful events to the internet in history. Major lost viewership and advertising revenue coupled with extreme consumer backlash. Most devastating would be developer backlash, as they would all need to scramble to find alternatives.
As long as youtube has RSS, you can still get videos.
I built this https://codeberg.org/mister_monster/YouTube2Peertube many years ago to help people resolve these problems.
Cool looking project. So is this something you use to mirror other people’s YouTube channels? Does this only mirror them to a self-hosted PeerTube? I have a home server that could process the mirroring itself but I have nowhere near the storage. If this is something I can point at a subscription feed and then point at a PeerTube server then I’d be happy running it in a Docker container or something. I already run ArchiveTeam agents.
You can mirror your own as well.
It doesn’t have to be self hosted peertube, as long as you have auth on the peertube server and you have a high enough upload cap it will work.
Yes, that is exactly how you’d use it, it runs on a server with some youtube channels to check periodically and some peertube accounts to mirror them to and it does it.
The Git data underlying this repository cannot be read. Contact the administrator of this instance or delete this repository.
I’ve never seen that problem before, but if you’re having trouble the codeberg repo is a mirror of a github repo I published it to first, https://github.com/mister-monster/youtube2peertube
Yeah weird. Codeberg is working now. I must have just been trying at the wrong time or something. Thanks!
Well there’s Kodi’s Netflix interface, looks pretty alternative to me: https://github.com/CastagnaIT/plugin.video.netflix
There’s always a way
You can’t save anything unless there’s a YouTube competitor. Google can do whatever it wants.
all of these are scrapers, so they will work unless YouTube gets rid of its web version
I think they mean something like widevine a la Netflix. Granted there are bypasses for some levels, but that could be a problem imo, iiuc that’s why there aren’t any alternate frontends for Netflix or HBO. I think that would also potentially mean issues playing YouTube in chromium or firefox on Linux if they used L1 (not sure what the current state of widevine on Linux is, last time I had Netflix I couldn’t watch on Linux and had to use my phone or Chromecast)
Or if Google implements some kind of feature that requires your browser to vouch that it’s not gonna play shenanigans with the page.
Nah, nobody would be that crazy.
Fair.
Would this new thing they’re doing to chrome stop it?
That’s exactly the sort if thing they could use it for
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Oh, thought this was an article with facts and figures, no someone’s doomsaying and fear mongering…
Many YouTube’s third party clients don’t use an API and having a public API with built in ads is a gold mine that many of YouTube’s embeds rely on for revenue. Doubt they’ll destroy that anytime soon.
Along with that, many of YouTube’s top creators are already looking for alternatives, floatplane, nebula etc… It just takes a mass exodus to kick start them. And you bet Google is aware of that.
I have clarified the title.
They successfully went after Vanced 2 years ago so it’s shouldn’t be too far fetched for them.
And yet here I am using Revanced, which is even better than Vanced was
Doesn’t work for a lot of accounts anymore. It plays one minute for me, first minute of a video and then dies.
New account works. Incognito works.
Fairly sure that’s a well-known issue. Not sure if it’s been fixed on new versions, but I think there are workarounds for it at least.
There’s a new patch for revanced which spoofs the client to fix this issue. Unfortunately it’s an optional patch that a lot of people miss, so they still have issues. I haven’t run into the “play a little bit then lock up” issue since the patch released
Had that issue, deleting and recompiling/installing the app fixed it. It’s some issue with spoofing the app signature. You shouldn’t need to uninstall microG or the revanced manager, just revanced itself
It’s annoying that you have to go through the effort of a reinstall, but that should fix it. Google isn’t blocking or doing anything to accounts, at least not yet
it’s a common theory that the only reason they went after Vanced is because the Vanced team tried to monetize the mod by introducing NFTs
Many people in modding and fan communities convince themselves that companies only go after projects if they try to make money, but we also see that happening with free projects all the time, if they get enough attention.
Seeing that Google is already sending warnings to people who try to watch YouTube with adblockers, I don’t think that’s what made the difference.
They went after vanced because they made money (they tried selling nfts) from from modifying google’s proprietary code. NewPipe team wrote everything themselves and dont make money from google code (they probably make no money at all)
Invidious doesn’t use YouTube’s API. It merely requests content from YouTube either directly or through a proxy. So, I don’t think it’ll disappear forever unless the developers stop working on it. It’s probably gonna be a game of cat and mouse where YouTube figures out how to break Invidious, and the devs keep finding a workaround.
requests content from Youtube
You mean through an API
Depending on the definition, loading a web page might me called an API, but that’s not what people mean when they talk about APIs.
But pretty much in the same way as the YouTube’s frontend requesting content from YouTube’s backend. This is an equivalent of you loading a video on YouTube then going to developer tools and copying links from the Network tab. AFAIK all tools (Invidious, Piped, yt-dl) work this way.
Yes. The problem is, it’s easy for google to break it again and again and again. I think we should just end Youtube
Right, the best way to win here is just not to play. Stop watching content on YouTube altogether. Find alternative ways to watch that content, or simply don’t watch it at all.
So instead of scraping the website the easier solution is to end Youtube?
Who wants to call Google and give them the difficult news that Youtube isn’t being renewed for another season?
I welcome the rise of their replacements.
Welp, time to “Archive” some good YouTube videos :)
