12 ms·
Vinegar: Safari extension that replaces YouTube embeds with HTML5 video tags
- TheTon 5y agoI’m really enjoying this. It’s so much faster and basic stuff like rotation that was janky under the YouTube player now works smoothly. But I have to wonder how long it lasts before YouTube takes steps to break it.
- musicale 5y ago> But I have to wonder how long it lasts before YouTube takes steps to break it Usually VLC lasts a week or two.
- xyst 5y agoExtremely useful on iPhones, iPads. Still going to use the default YT player on macOS though. Live streaming quality on macOS is very low quality with the html5 player.
- DeathArrow 5y agoublock Origin also does the trick of blocking YouTube ads. And is free. Both as in free speech and in free beer. :)
- google234123 5y agoCan video producers get free beer with 0 ad revenue?
- DeathArrow 5y agoMany video producers on YT have deals with sponsors. The ads are embedded in video and are not blocked.
- Nextgrid 5y agoYou can (and I very much recommend) use SponsorBlock to get rid of those too, unless you are very interested in hearing about the same snake-oil VPN, shitty earphones or pay-to-win mobile game every time.
- html5web 5y agoThanks for working on this! It just works!
- ronjouch 5y agoDoes anyone know about an equivalent extension for Firefox / Chrome?
- Synaesthesia 5y agoOn firefox unblock origin blocks all ads and video background player allows background playing on mobile which is awesome.
- rand0mx1 5y agoinstall ublock origin and put following filters ||youtube.com^$3p,frame,redirect=click2load.html ||youtube-nocookie.com^$3p,frame,redirect=click2load.html
- rpgbr 5y agoDidn't change anything here.
- jandorn 5y agoStopTheMadness for Safari in Mac app store provides extensions for Firefox and Chrome. At leas it just to, i think it still does.
- lelandfe 5y agoHow does this handle video quality selection? My phone tends to default to 360p on YouTube for some reason.
- comeonseriously 5y agoCould be a carrier setting. Log into your carrier account and see if there some sort of data saver that blocks higher bitrate videos.
- MBCook 5y agoI was under the impression Google was doing that to force people to use their app for higher resolutions.
- Orphis 5y agoSo they are charging people to remove ads so that the content creator doesn't get any ad revenue from their views? So ethical.
- sneak 5y agoThe ethical issue that I have with it is not the money, it's that you cannot get anything from the App Store (even free apps!) without giving Apple your rough location (client IP), a phone number (required to get an Apple ID), and your unchangeable device hardware serial number. Fuck that noise. Don't give money to App-Store-only software vendors.
- MBCook 5y agoI subscribe to YouTube, so I already pay them. If I watched YouTube on my phone or my iPad at all, I would definitely install this. Realistically I almost always use my TV to watch YouTube. So it doesn’t matter. Purposefully breaking built in functionality (full screen, PIP, etc) to force people to use your app or to remove the functionality altogether is a dick move. Something that’s getting real common with Google.
- rezonant 5y agoI don't understand. I can load YouTube.com in my mobile browser, go full screen, and then enter my home screen and I get picture in picture just fine. It works whether I'm Premium or not. I don't need a mobile app for it. What has YouTube broken here? I will say that I cannot use picture in picture while browsing another site in Chrome. That sucks, but I don't think that is YouTube's choice, that's just how the browser works (sadly)
- LeoPanthera 5y agoAirPlay kinda-sorta works from the YouTube player but it is glitchy as hell. It works way better from normal HTML5 videos.
- rezonant 5y ago
- 9935c101ab17a66 5y agoI really love this idea, but it seems like on macOS, you can't use the left/right arrows to skip forward/backward. I did some testing and this appears to be a limitation of the HTML5 video player implemented in Safari, but it would be amazing if this functionality was added (along with other keyboard shortcuts).
- lelandfe 5y agoSlapped this together. const video = document.getElementById("video"); const skipSecs = 5; video.onkeydown = (e) => { if (e.keyCode !== 37 && e.keyCode !== 39) return; e.preventDefault(); const time = video.currentTime; video.currentTime = e.keyCode === 37 ? time - skipSecs : time + skipSecs; };
- judge2020 5y agoJ for rewinding 10 seconds, K for pausing, and L for fast-forwarding 10 seconds is what i've gotten used to, along with , and . for frame-by-frame scrubbing. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7631406?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7631406?hl=en
- sodality2 5y agoSo what is this, replacing it with an invidious-hosted embed?
- makeworld 5y agoProbably it's resolving the direct video (and/or audio) links and setting those as the source in the video tag. Like using the -g option for yt-dlp.
- sodality2 5y agoAh, interesting! I didn't think of that.
- getcrunk 5y agoCould u explain how that works or what to do?
- makeworld 5y agohttps://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp has reverse-engineered YouTube, and can take a video ID and figure out the direct video link. The --get-url, or -g option will return that URL.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoI bought it. Here's the actual code it injected for a video: https://pastebin.com/fue6KWME https://pastebin.com/fue6KWME
- getcrunk 5y agoHow do you think they got that source url?
- LeoPanthera 5y agoIf it was me, I would have looked at how youtube-dl does it.
- dmart 5y agoInstalled this and it's great. That said, it's embarrassing how many iOS extensions I have installed just to work around today's shitty websites. AdGuard to make the web usable, AMPlosion to avoid AMP nonsense, Open in Apollo to avoid mobile Reddit dark pattens, now this (which I installed because YouTube's new embed widget starts playing on touch-start instead of touch-release, so it triggers while scrolling...)
- rolleiflex 5y agoAlso bought it and works great. Minor caveat is that it seems to be unable to get a 4K stream, so it’s capped to 1080p. Likely this is a YouTube limitation though.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThis is probably because YouTube exclusively uses VP9 for 4K streams, instead of HEVC.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoDon't forget TrackerZapper to strip tracking codes from copied URLs: https://rknight.me/apps/tracker-zapper/ https://rknight.me/apps/tracker-zapper/
- jchw 5y agoStopthemadness should also help you to avoid AMP, but also does a bunch of other stuff. Might be worth a look.
- drcongo 5y agoI had to disable Stopthemadness because while it does do some really useful things, it also caused a lot of problems.
- jandorn 5y agoI run it with recommend options + Show video controls and Stop autoplay and I have no issues other than occasional glitches because those two advanced options. What problems do you have?
- rezonant 5y agoLovely... > The removal of in-video ads. You can pay YouTube for ad-free viewing... not doing so and stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it" > Prevent YouTube from tracking your play/pause/seek activities. A little bit of a tinfoil hat issue here, but it's fair if this sort of analytics bother you (it doesn't bother me). > Restore picture-in-picture functionality. Picture in picture works just fine on Windows and Android without a YouTube Premium account. Is this something specific to iPhone? > The videos don’t stop playing if you switch to another browser tab. On mobile, web videos are paused when you switch tabs or apps regardless of the website. Not something YouTube can control, and certainly not something YouTube is intentionally doing (unless you count Google and the decisions Chrome makes, and there is definitely something to that). What YouTube is doing, as I'll elaborate on in the next point, is stopping you from resuming the content after you have switched away from that tab. On all other websites, as long as they do nothing to prevent it, you can resume your video in the background by going to your media controls and hitting the Play button. On desktop, this is not an issue, whether you have YouTube Premium or not. YouTube does not pause or stop videos when you switch tabs. > You can choose the audio-only stream to keep the music playing when Safari is in the background. As I hinted above, the crux of this one is that YouTube has deemed that background playback is a paid feature of YouTube Premium. I think this is silly, but it is their policy. Feel free to work around YouTube's technical restrictions on this topic if you want, but I return to exhibit A, that you can skip the ads and the restrictions if you sign up for YouTube Premium. In the Flash days, making it use HTML 5 was (afaict) a quality of life change. This extension seems a bit sketchy at best. On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem only probably says more about the Apple ecosystem than anything else (as I've said, this is mostly unnecessary on other platforms). EDIT: PS: I would love if Chrome and the other browsers reversed their decision to auto-pause HTML5 video when you switch tabs or apps on mobile. It just feels like a way to push native mobile apps over web apps for no reason. I understand the risk potential of allowing this on the open web, but I think a permissioning model can work here to reduce the risks.
- Eelongate 5y agoI'm something of a master thief myself; my whole life when commercial breaks started on TV, I changed the channel or turned the TV off.
- kactus 5y agoUnrelated, but has anyone else had issues with embedded YouTube videos playing just by swiping your finger over them while scrolling the page on iOS? I’m sorely tempted to block YouTube at the network level, it’s so annoying.
- xfalcox 5y agoReply above says > because YouTube's new embed widget starts playing on touch-start instead of touch-release, so it triggers while scrolling...
- Demcox 5y ago> I’m sorely tempted to block YouTube at the network level, it’s so annoying I've done this. One of the best decisions of my november 2021. I do not miss it one bit.
- qwnp 5y agoI can't fathom why Google decided to do this, it's profoundly irritating! Looks like Vinegar fixes this (even in apps other than Safari). $2 very well spent.
- busymom0 5y agoI seem to randomly get "playback failed" errors when using this. Most of the times it works fine though. Also, not sure if related but my phone seems to heat up quite a lot when using this. I am on an old iPhone 6S.
- meemo 5y agoBought it and it looks greater. However, I am wary due to the permissions where the extension "can read sensitive information." I understand that there's probably no way around this, but still.
- kergonath 5y agoYeah, that’s unfortunate that we have to trust developers to that extent. OTOH, it is true that they could get a lot of information once we give them the right to inject some JavaScript in every webpage we load. Personally, I have enabled it only on YouTube so they should not be able to touch the rest.
- jiriro 5y agoHow do you enable an extension (this one) ONLY on youtube?
- Eric_WVGG 5y agoSystem Settings / Safari / Extensions / Vinegar Set “all websites” to “deny” Visit YouTube.com. Run the extension from the puzzle icon in the address bar, give it permission for “allow on this website”
- jiriro 5y agoCool. Thanks! I guess this feature is not available on macOS pre-Monterey (i.e. Big Sur)? I could not find it neither in macOS / System Preferences nor Safari / Preferences / Extensions.
- Eric_WVGG 5y agoIt would appear that this granularity is not part of Monterey's implementation of extensions at all. Might be a good addition to the Vinegar app.
- kergonath 5y ago
- divs1210 5y agoI have been using Brave Browser on mobile for accessing YouTube. It blocks ads, allows playing music in the background, supports making offline YouTube playlists, etc. Pretty neat, and I don't have to trust other vendors apart from the Brave team, who I already trust. This app is pretty great too and the price is very reasonable. But still infinite% costlier than free!
- jiriro 5y agoSeems very good. Anyway the original youtube player's controls: j/k/l/m for 10_sec_backward/pause/10_sec_forward/mute are missing.
- Demcox 5y agoInstalled and running great. An OTP of 1.99$ for what is esstially YouTube Music is a steal. Will it enjoy it as long as it continues to work (ie. until YT breaks it).
- Khaine 5y agoThis is great just to get standard video controls. I mostly don't mind YouTube ads, except for two things: 1) they allow ads significantly longer than the ad break, forcing you to interact to skip the ad (i.e. all those stupid music videos as ads), and; 2) Text ad pop over the video content. Their entire business is showing us videos we want to watch, and they cover it with a text ad overlay. Its like they want to go out of business. I also don't like that ads are spliced in at inopportune times, breaking the flow of many videos.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y agoI really get the sense YouTube’s business model isn’t getting users to watch videos, it is to get users to watch something else at all times. I created several custom filters to disable the litany of suggestions that pop up at every opportunity. There’s this constant onslaught of suggestions. An icon in the top right of the player during playback, a modal that appears when you hit pause showing other videos, the sidebar full of clickbait, and other incessant recommendations. I don’t know how the average user puts up with it.
- alin23 5y agoThis is worth it even just for removing the so annoying play on scroll behaviour! I have YouTube Premium and still feel the need for it. Also, $2 feels just right for these medium effort apps. Unfortunately people still complain about it not being free. When I asked $2 for a macOS app [0] where I worked for a bit more than a month, people got offended by it. Coding the app logic is just a small part of launching an app, there's also presentation websites, privacy policies, icons, graphics, instructing the user how to use your app if it's something more unique, and the most time consuming of all: handling edge cases. [0] https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd
- killingtime74 5y agoIt’s not necessary to please everyone, some people will just never be customers
- leokennis 5y agoLoving it, would love it even more if it worked for other video embeds too...there are exactly no scenarios where "your awesome embedded video player" is better than "standard HTML5 video player".
- matvp 5y agoI didn't verify this but my guess is that with the lack of the MSE API on Safari iOS, YT has no other option but to serve the HLS manifest directly to the video element thus it's a whole lot easier to grab the HLS URL (after YT's player JS generated the signature). Would be a bit more tricky to do this on Chrome (or Firefox) where the video buffer is built in code (MSE). On second thought, muxing mpeg2ts to mp4 containers would make it possible to play the same HLS stream on Chrome.
- Fudgel 5y agoDoes that mean its limited to 720p video (since higher resolutions use HLS)?
- pixelgeek 5y agoJust wanted to pop into this thread again. I was watching some videos last night on my iPad using this extension and the quality of the videos was much better. Not sure what YouTube is doing but overall my viewing experience was much better with this extension