15 ms·

Invidious – An open source alternative front-end to YouTube

353 points by panki27 3y ago

zolbrek 3y ago
It's a pity it's now hard to find an instance which allows downloads, it was nice to be able to grab things on mobile.
- kevinlinxc 3y ago
  I use side-loaded 4K Video Downloader: https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloaderandroid-41 https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloaderandroid-4.... Not a regular viewing client though.
  - zolbrek 3y ago
    This looks promising, thank you. edit: If I end up trying this out it will have to be on a separate user profile because of the permissions.
    - boneitis 3y ago
      Are you guys not super sketched out by that website? Self-hosted (and unavailable on f-droid) download (why not just use NewPipe at this point?), vague About Us page, duplicated and almost certainly fake "positive reviews" left by different outlets, etc. Personally, i just install termux and yt-dlp. Admittedly, i am on a rooted device, but i think some additional tooling is available to give termux access to the shared user storage area.
      - zolbrek 3y ago
        I got sketched out when I took a closer look at it. I forgot NewPipe existed to be quite frank, it makes much more sense for me to use it instead of the linked app.
- bitwize 3y ago
  NewPipe still works.
- unixfox 3y ago
  Because bandwidth is not cheap and there are better tools for downloading. Either youtube-dl or newpipe.
  - RockRobotRock 3y ago
    Little aside, it’s yt-dlp now. It’s still awesome.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      Another aside: youtube-dl still exists, since yt-dlp was forked from it. youtube-dl isn't that awesome, so you should use yt-dlp. It's similar to OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice or XFree86 vs X.org: the old one is still there, but it sucks.
- lazycouchpotato 3y ago
  NewPipe works perfectly fine for downloading videos. https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/ It doesn't seem to do 4K video on my Pixel 6a - I'm only getting up to 1080p downloads.
- toni 3y ago
  On Android, you can use Seal[1] to download YT videos locally. It also supports many other sites. [1] https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal
armsaw 3y ago
A selfhosted instance of this, combined with Yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee as a client on iOS and tvOS is a pretty decent way to consume YT subscriptions with minimal exposure to algorithm and ads.
- ge96 3y ago
  YT has a popup now (adblocker detected) that gets past UBO.
  - mainpassathome 3y ago
    the parent comment had no reference to ubo? invidous doesn’t use the youtube ui or account
    - ge96 3y ago
      > minimal exposure to algorithm and ads Was commenting about that
      - chickenisgreat 3y ago
        ...yes? but the parent comment had no reference to ubo?
        ge96 3y ago
        [flagged]
        jchw 3y ago
        I'm frustrated that you have replied three times and still not explained how uBlock Origin has anything to do with this third party client that is not a web browser and neither needs nor can even potentially use uBlock Origin.
  - numpad0 3y ago
Karupan 3y ago
I host my own instance and it’s pretty great. With a disabled home page feed, I don’t get distracted with random “popular” crap. I only seek our videos that I need and it has reduced my YouTube consumption considerably.
- kahnclusions 3y ago
  Hilariously, YT has disabled the homepage feed if you have search history disabled. They think this will make people turn search history on… So now I always come to a nice clean homepage before I go looking for through my subscriptions.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    That is hilarious because it first happened way back when GDPR was in the news, to me at least, I opted out because why not. Sure enough a lot of features stopped working. But here's the funny part, they came back! And from then until just a a month ago I've had my search history "disabled" but all those features working. Then suddenly a month ago they told me yet again that I have to enable search history and this time they disabled all the same shit.
  - varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jantissler 3y ago
    This is amazing. Thank you for that. I love the clean look of my empty homepage!
T3RMINATED 3y ago
[dead]
blopker 3y ago
I wonder if someone will make a browser extension that swaps out the video tag on youtube.com and replaces it with an Invidious (or other YT frontend) instance stream for the same video. You'd get an ad-free experience on YouTube without users needing to learn a new site. The added benefit is that the extension could load balance between different front ends and remove/add ones without the user changing anything.
- ploum 3y ago
  There are multiple Firefox’s extensions redirecting Youtube to alternative frontends, including with embedded videos. Some are even balancing automatically.
  - sphars 3y ago
    Specifically, here's an extension that does just that and more (FF and Chromium): https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/
beej71 3y ago
I'm a little surprised Google doesn't bake all the ads directly into the stream at this point, making it extremely difficult to separate them.
- guerrilla 3y ago
  Extremely difficult? No. SponsorBlock already removes in-stream ads. If things get more complicated, ML will be employed. It's an arms race but so far things seem to be on our side. Long-term, I don't know.
  - 0x073 3y ago
    They could just block buffering this video until the time of the ad is finished on serverside, as they know how long the ad is. You still can block ads but you must wait if you see a black window or an ad stream.
    - guerrilla 3y ago
      We can just buffer manually and wait. It's an unsolvable problem without DRM, and even then...
    - treyd 3y ago
      This whole approach would massively increase the cost of distribution due to how CDN networks scale.
    - 9991 3y ago
      A silent black screen would still be a win. Ads are disinformation.
      - flakes 3y ago
        Yep, I'm tired of fighting the arms race with twitch ads, so I just mute the video now and do something else for a few minutes. I would honestly be perfectly happy with a black screen for 30 seconds as a compromise to ads. I only leave the twitch webpage because the visuals bother me almost just as much as hearing the stupid sales pitch or the goofy "lol we're so cheeky and random" jokes made non-stop by insurance company ads.
ploum 3y ago
At some point, we should learn to upload our videos elsewhere. https://joinpeertube.org/en https://joinpeertube.org/en
- vmfunction 3y ago
  yes! However youtube got stuck with a lot great videos. Unless someone form IPFS or torrent community are already secretively archiving youtube videos. Then youtube video random view key will just serve as an index for videos for a globally archived videos (the video can also sit on owner's hard drive) (kinda like what archive.org is doing for web page). Then someone can write a plugin to republish the video to peertube, web torrent, odyssey all the other alternative video sharing sites. This shall at least to start take people's dependancy off of youtube/alphabet/google platform/infrastructure.
  - wesapien 3y ago
    No doubt there are people doing that for awhile now.
  - ploum 3y ago
    Peertube allows you to mirror a Youtube channel so, at the very least, creators could already create a Peertube mirror of their own content with very few effort. Peertube also allows to proeminently display a configurable "support" button to redirect viewers to your patreon/liberapay/paypal or whatever. The only reason to not mirror your content to peertube? Because you want people to watch Youtube ads. But, as this news show us, nobody want to watch the ads. PS: I’m surprized peertube is not more famous so I posted it independently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37906699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37906699
- GabeIsko 3y ago
  While I agree in principle, I think the harsh reality is that hosting video content is a much heavier lift than text. I don't have confidence that a decentralized video platform really any legs atm. Being wrong about this would be a pleasant surprise. Stuff like individuous is better positioned to start mixing youtube content with videos from decentralized hosting. But I don't think anyone has committed to doing that. I'm sure google would not like it either. I know Freetube has already committed to not being interested in this. I'll be on the lookout for a fork.
erickj 3y ago
How exactly are creators paid for their creations from this "ethically designed" front end?
- guerrilla 3y ago
  Patreon and the like are the hest ways.
- mainpassathome 3y ago
  donations and sponsors, as usual
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  Oh you mean the 99% of “creators” flooding YouTube with repetitive and ai-generated crap content to leverage ad revenue “ethically”? They can go pound sand as far as I’m concerned. There is great content in YouTube for sure but let’s face it, 99% is garbage designed to 1) latch on to popular trends to get more views and 2) use that to show ads and generate revenue for what’s essentially no content at all - just random garbage.
  - antifa 3y ago
    Is it not safe to assume we're not watching the 99% of videos?
  - Reubend 3y ago
    It's not productive to say that 99% of the people contributing content are making garbage. Even if that were true, the 1% of good creators are equally affected by a lack of ad revenue as the bad ones. The parent comment is basically pointing out that you're depriving the creators you watch of ad revenue. If you sponsor the creators you watch directly, that's great! But most people don't, and even for the people on HN I suspect that they watch a lot more different channels than just the ones they sponsor.
    - throwaway5959 3y ago
      These people are willing to contort themselves into a pretzel to justify getting something for nothing. They’re no different than people that show up to a restaurant, get an hours worth of good service from a waiter then tip them nothing (in the US) and claim they believe tipping is morally wrong and the system should be brought down. “No dude, you’re just a cheap bastard.”
jaredcwhite 3y ago
I'll have to go try this out again. Lately I've just been relying on Feedbin to let me watch subscribed channel videos (quite a nice experience actually), but that misses out on a number of features which I might be able to get from this.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Invidious can also provide RSS feeds, so you can keep using your RSS-based workflow with it.
ctoth 3y ago
This is cool but I never could figure out why it was named like an Imperial Star Destroyer.
- effie 3y ago
  adjective (of an action or situation) likely to arouse or incur resentment or anger in others. "she'd put herself in an invidious position" synonyms: unpleasant undesirable ungrateful Pretty apt name, considering what the software does.
  - marc_abonce 3y ago
    TIL that invidious is an actual English word. I always suspected that it was video related pun, something like "in-videos".
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      The fact that the word also contains "vid" probably has something to do with why they picked that word for the project name, in addition to the actual meaning of the word.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >why it was named like an Imperial Star Destroyer What's wrong with that? The world would be better IMO if more software projects had names fitting of the ships of the Galactic Imperial Navy. Say what you want about the Empire's treatment of the many worlds under its control, but they're really good at things like naming ships as well as having good-looking starships and uniforms.
tiltowait 3y ago
Using Kagi, I set up a domain redirect to point youtube.com search results to an Invidious instance. Works great.
torartc 3y ago
It’s fine but at least try with the ui. It’s like they spent 2 min on it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- betamaxthetape 3y ago
  No, please, the UI is one of the best things about it. I can run YouTube on my 20-year-old iMac G4 (PowerPC G4 processor, 1GB of RAM) and it ... just works. Most other sites fail completely - Gmail Basic HTML view and Hacker News being two notable exceptions.
  - torartc 3y ago
    I personally don’t understand the desire to have an ugly tool just because it’s minimal. You can have minimal and not have it be ugly.
  - pathartl 3y ago
    Can your 20 year old Mac even decode high definition H.264/5 videos?
- pathartl 3y ago
  Truly built by engineers
  - syncbehind 3y ago
    I mean, it's open source. Don't like it? You can fork it and create something better.
    - torartc 3y ago
      Sure, but if you want people to use it, you could also just spend an additional day to make it look decent instead of expecting a fork to do it.
mpitt 3y ago
Interesting, from the doc[1]: "Because of various issues Invidious must be restarted often, at least once a day, ideally every hour." [1] https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#post-install-configuration https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#post-install-configu... I guess it's related to this issue, a memory leak (or probably multiple): https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1438 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1438 Also interesting that the issue is almost 3 years old and mentions even older reports.
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  Getting invidious to run was a gigantic pain for me. It definitely consumed all my RAM and crashed my system at least once.
  - turtlebits 3y ago
    Odd, I have the docker image running on a cheap 4gb VPS and it's been rock solid so far (set it up about a week ago).
  - toastercat 3y ago
    It was definitely a pain in the ass before the official docker image. Have you tried that?
    - RockRobotRock 3y ago
      Thank you! I'll try the Docker image.
      - toastercat 3y ago
        No problem. And I meant to mention the Docker Compose config they have here [0]. This is what I use to self-host on my Raspberry Pi, and it works great. Just make sure to add a cron job that restarts the container every hour to get around the memory leak issue (my cron job is literally /bin/docker restart <container_name>) [0] https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#docker https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#docker
rorychatt 3y ago
Is this legal? In Google's Terms and Conditions, it's says that bypassing ads violates Youtube's terms and conditions. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en#:~:text=When%20you%20block%20YouTube%20ads,sign%20up%20for%20YouTube%20Premium https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en#:~:....
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  Nope! The real question is who cares or is willing to do something about it.
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  It is legal, Invidious hasn't signed that agreement and doesn't use YouTube's API. They got a legal letter from YouTube[0] to which they responded publicly. > "They don't understand that we never agreed to any of their TOS/policies, they don't understand that we don't use their API." [0] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872
  - abnry 3y ago
    Isn't using the website kind of like using an API?
    - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
      They refer to the registration-gated "Developer API"
      - rorychatt 3y ago
        I'm not sure. IANAL, but reading the developer policy, reference is made to include the Youtube Developer Site & Services, but is not exclusive of other Youtube API Services. Whether Invidious uses a Public Developer API, a Broker offering their own API, or a workaround with an internal API seems inconsequential. https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-policies#definition-youtube-api-services https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici... # Client: `"API Client" means a website or software application (including a mobile application) developed by you that accesses or uses the YouTube API Services.` # Service: "YouTube API Services" means (i) the YouTube API services (e.g., YouTube Data API service and YouTube Reporting API service) made available by YouTube including those YouTube API services made available on the YouTube Developer Site (as defined below), (ii) documentation, information, materials, sample code and software (including any human-readable programming instructions) relating to YouTube API services that are made available on https://developers.google.com/youtube or by YouTube, (iii) data, content (including audiovisual content) and information provided to API Clients (as defined above) through the YouTube API services (the "API Data"), and (iv) the credentials assigned to you and your API Client(s) by YouTube or Google." I'm not sure how I feel about software that sits on this grey line of legality sitting on the front page of HN.
smashah 3y ago
The tech industry failed the invidious team and other projects like this. This should be 100% legal and allowed based on a right-to-mod precedent but not lawyer is willing to take it that far because this is open source. This project gives control back to the user. It shouldn't be a grey zone and it shouldn't put maintainers at risk to work on it. Till this issue is resolved, OSS projects like this are unsustainable. Some evil megacorp is already carpet bombing maintainers with C&Ds and there is ZERO help for this.
- Sabinus 3y ago
  "Some evil megacorp is already carpet bombing maintainers with C&Ds and there is ZERO help for this." Is it possible or realistic for a code host to not care about US copyright laws and for developers to contribute anonymously?
  - callalex 3y ago
    It’s certainly possible, but going down that path sounds like a good way to end up like Aaron Schwartz.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      I don't really see how. I think it's more like a good way to end up like Dmitry Sklyarov.
      - trimethylpurine 3y ago
        In that case, the software developer dropped charges because the circumvention wasn't available in the US. That was lucky for Dmitry, because they might have still won civil damages even if he was not charged criminally. Would Google drop the case? I'm not convinced they have any reason to. I wouldn't take the risk. But, I'm not a lawyer. Regardless, this clearly is available in the US, and provides circumvention to US users via an Iceland (EU) server. This is not similar to Dmitry's case.
  - qweqwe14 3y ago
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
I’ve been seeing Crystal pop up more and more lately, I want to dive back into that again.
- mikebelanger 3y ago
  Yeah, me too. I was checking out the Lucky framework the other day. At least on paper, it looks impressive.
silenced_trope 3y ago
How does this work? I just installed, then uninstalled, the Chrome (Brave) extension that is supposed to redirect videos to some invidious instance. I use Brave and am now seeing the "sorry you can't watch YouTube" anymore sign because Brave blocks ads. I thought installing the extension from the website would just redirect whatever video I clicked on to the mirrored video on an Invidious instance, is that not the case?
stevefan1999 3y ago
Can I have high-availability and load balance support so that I can virtually host them over a Kubernetes cluster?
- unixfox 3y ago
  There is an helm chart: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/tree/master/kubernetes https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/tree/master/kubernetes
aitchnyu 3y ago
Does Invidious in Firefox allow more than 720p? Seems I cant get any higher resolution.
- jraph 3y ago
  You gave me doubt, I just checked and 1080p is available on Firefox in my private Invidious instance.
- Tmpod 3y ago
  You need to enable the DASH format in the settings if it isn't already, I think.
- caeruleus 3y ago
  AFAIK you have to select DASH as your preferred video quality (or append &quality=dash) for other resolutions to work. It's not enabled by default because the server has to proxy the video (CORS): https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/177#issuecomment-423843512 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/177#issuecomment-...
  - aitchnyu 3y ago
    Thanks, pruned my list to instances that allow DASH.
nikisweeting 3y ago
There is a great list of many alternative frontends I found here: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends They work well for internet archiving too, e.g. when Twitter or Reddit are being annoying and showing popups/login redirects/etc. you can replace the URL with an alternative frontend version and archive the content without the cruft.
- danhau 3y ago
  Thank you! This is great.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  See also farside [0], which maintains a list of functional instances of alternate frontends, and can redirect links to a working instance automatically. [0] https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/ https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/
thomasfl 3y ago
I just love the domain name of this Invidious powered website https://yewtu.be https://yewtu.be.
- zoobab 3y ago
  Belgians to the rescue (tm)
zoobab 3y ago
Anyone to help porting it to WASM?
ode 3y ago
Why are there no alternative front ends to Instagram? I know there was one previously that shut down but no more have popped up.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  I think the main difference is youtube gives you access to nearly everything without a login while instagram does not. Having said that there are some web pages allowing you to browse "public" instagram accounts outside of the instagram page but I guess they rely on tons of short lived bot accounts.
- highbaser 3y ago
  There was Barinsta which Meta DMCA'd down and threatened to sue its developer if Barinsta is not removed and discontinued. As is always the case, the developer got scared, had complied and these news spread across the community, so now there might be less developers who dare to publish an alternative, even less to put a lot of work into something that will be rewarded with threats and lawsuits. The reason why there's no alternative to Instagram is corporate arrogance. That is a common phenomenon at corporate giants like Meta.
walteweiss 3y ago
I wonder if my iPad 3 story with YouTube¹ can be fixed here, with this service 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37700283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37700283
- unixfox 3y ago
  You can try, invidious support old devices.
gsuuon 3y ago
How exactly does this work? I guess it's not just showing embedded players for video. Is it scraping comments?
gorenb 3y ago
i’ve been using this for over a year, and it’s honestly really amazing.
sylware 3y ago
Yep, those are corner stones to interoperability with noscript/basic (x)html browsers, which should be supported by the actual web sites in a best effort scenario (and should be mandatory for tons of administrative online services or core online services). But many toxic coders working there are actively making their "web interface" ultra hard dependent on running javascript code in the client, for instance with extremely volatile and complex web browser fingerprinting. For instance, the new kick.com which will "javascript check your web browser", and you better have a Big Tech web engine... Don't be fooled on where the real evil is... Interoperability of Big Tech with Small Tech is prime. Only hardcore regulation can do it and it must expect the worst: Big Tech shadow-hiring hacker teams to give hell to Big Tech alternatives.
webdoodle 3y ago
Why would I use this over YoutubeDL hosted on a low power device like a NUC or Raspberry PI?
- panki27 3y ago
  Invidious is a web frontend. YoutubeDL is a downloader. So I don't really see what your question is getting at.
_chu1 3y ago
Great way to watch YouTube at school when the main site is blocked btw

353 points by panki27 3y ago

zolbrek 3y ago

It's a pity it's now hard to find an instance which allows downloads, it was nice to be able to grab things on mobile.

kevinlinxc 3y ago
I use side-loaded 4K Video Downloader: https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloaderandroid-41 https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloaderandroid-4.... Not a regular viewing client though.
- zolbrek 3y ago
  This looks promising, thank you. edit: If I end up trying this out it will have to be on a separate user profile because of the permissions.
  - boneitis 3y ago
    Are you guys not super sketched out by that website? Self-hosted (and unavailable on f-droid) download (why not just use NewPipe at this point?), vague About Us page, duplicated and almost certainly fake "positive reviews" left by different outlets, etc. Personally, i just install termux and yt-dlp. Admittedly, i am on a rooted device, but i think some additional tooling is available to give termux access to the shared user storage area.
    - zolbrek 3y ago
      I got sketched out when I took a closer look at it. I forgot NewPipe existed to be quite frank, it makes much more sense for me to use it instead of the linked app.
bitwize 3y ago
NewPipe still works.
unixfox 3y ago
Because bandwidth is not cheap and there are better tools for downloading. Either youtube-dl or newpipe.
- RockRobotRock 3y ago
  Little aside, it’s yt-dlp now. It’s still awesome.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Another aside: youtube-dl still exists, since yt-dlp was forked from it. youtube-dl isn't that awesome, so you should use yt-dlp. It's similar to OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice or XFree86 vs X.org: the old one is still there, but it sucks.
lazycouchpotato 3y ago
NewPipe works perfectly fine for downloading videos. https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/ It doesn't seem to do 4K video on my Pixel 6a - I'm only getting up to 1080p downloads.
toni 3y ago
On Android, you can use Seal[1] to download YT videos locally. It also supports many other sites. [1] https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal

armsaw 3y ago

A selfhosted instance of this, combined with Yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee as a client on iOS and tvOS is a pretty decent way to consume YT subscriptions with minimal exposure to algorithm and ads.

ge96 3y ago
YT has a popup now (adblocker detected) that gets past UBO.
- mainpassathome 3y ago
  the parent comment had no reference to ubo? invidous doesn’t use the youtube ui or account
  - ge96 3y ago
    > minimal exposure to algorithm and ads Was commenting about that
    - chickenisgreat 3y ago
      ...yes? but the parent comment had no reference to ubo?
      - ge96 3y ago
        [flagged]
        jchw 3y ago
        I'm frustrated that you have replied three times and still not explained how uBlock Origin has anything to do with this third party client that is not a web browser and neither needs nor can even potentially use uBlock Origin.
- numpad0 3y ago

Karupan 3y ago

I host my own instance and it’s pretty great. With a disabled home page feed, I don’t get distracted with random “popular” crap. I only seek our videos that I need and it has reduced my YouTube consumption considerably.

kahnclusions 3y ago
Hilariously, YT has disabled the homepage feed if you have search history disabled. They think this will make people turn search history on… So now I always come to a nice clean homepage before I go looking for through my subscriptions.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  That is hilarious because it first happened way back when GDPR was in the news, to me at least, I opted out because why not. Sure enough a lot of features stopped working. But here's the funny part, they came back! And from then until just a a month ago I've had my search history "disabled" but all those features working. Then suddenly a month ago they told me yet again that I have to enable search history and this time they disabled all the same shit.
- varelse 3y ago
  [dead]
- jantissler 3y ago
  This is amazing. Thank you for that. I love the clean look of my empty homepage!

T3RMINATED 3y ago

[dead]

blopker 3y ago

I wonder if someone will make a browser extension that swaps out the video tag on youtube.com and replaces it with an Invidious (or other YT frontend) instance stream for the same video. You'd get an ad-free experience on YouTube without users needing to learn a new site. The added benefit is that the extension could load balance between different front ends and remove/add ones without the user changing anything.

ploum 3y ago
There are multiple Firefox’s extensions redirecting Youtube to alternative frontends, including with embedded videos. Some are even balancing automatically.
- sphars 3y ago
  Specifically, here's an extension that does just that and more (FF and Chromium): https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/

beej71 3y ago

I'm a little surprised Google doesn't bake all the ads directly into the stream at this point, making it extremely difficult to separate them.

guerrilla 3y ago
Extremely difficult? No. SponsorBlock already removes in-stream ads. If things get more complicated, ML will be employed. It's an arms race but so far things seem to be on our side. Long-term, I don't know.
- 0x073 3y ago
  They could just block buffering this video until the time of the ad is finished on serverside, as they know how long the ad is. You still can block ads but you must wait if you see a black window or an ad stream.
  - guerrilla 3y ago
    We can just buffer manually and wait. It's an unsolvable problem without DRM, and even then...
  - treyd 3y ago
    This whole approach would massively increase the cost of distribution due to how CDN networks scale.
  - 9991 3y ago
    A silent black screen would still be a win. Ads are disinformation.
    - flakes 3y ago
      Yep, I'm tired of fighting the arms race with twitch ads, so I just mute the video now and do something else for a few minutes. I would honestly be perfectly happy with a black screen for 30 seconds as a compromise to ads. I only leave the twitch webpage because the visuals bother me almost just as much as hearing the stupid sales pitch or the goofy "lol we're so cheeky and random" jokes made non-stop by insurance company ads.

ploum 3y ago

At some point, we should learn to upload our videos elsewhere. https://joinpeertube.org/en https://joinpeertube.org/en

vmfunction 3y ago
yes! However youtube got stuck with a lot great videos. Unless someone form IPFS or torrent community are already secretively archiving youtube videos. Then youtube video random view key will just serve as an index for videos for a globally archived videos (the video can also sit on owner's hard drive) (kinda like what archive.org is doing for web page). Then someone can write a plugin to republish the video to peertube, web torrent, odyssey all the other alternative video sharing sites. This shall at least to start take people's dependancy off of youtube/alphabet/google platform/infrastructure.
- wesapien 3y ago
  No doubt there are people doing that for awhile now.
- ploum 3y ago
  Peertube allows you to mirror a Youtube channel so, at the very least, creators could already create a Peertube mirror of their own content with very few effort. Peertube also allows to proeminently display a configurable "support" button to redirect viewers to your patreon/liberapay/paypal or whatever. The only reason to not mirror your content to peertube? Because you want people to watch Youtube ads. But, as this news show us, nobody want to watch the ads. PS: I’m surprized peertube is not more famous so I posted it independently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37906699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37906699
GabeIsko 3y ago
While I agree in principle, I think the harsh reality is that hosting video content is a much heavier lift than text. I don't have confidence that a decentralized video platform really any legs atm. Being wrong about this would be a pleasant surprise. Stuff like individuous is better positioned to start mixing youtube content with videos from decentralized hosting. But I don't think anyone has committed to doing that. I'm sure google would not like it either. I know Freetube has already committed to not being interested in this. I'll be on the lookout for a fork.

erickj 3y ago

How exactly are creators paid for their creations from this "ethically designed" front end?

guerrilla 3y ago
Patreon and the like are the hest ways.
mainpassathome 3y ago
donations and sponsors, as usual
loloquwowndueo 3y ago
Oh you mean the 99% of “creators” flooding YouTube with repetitive and ai-generated crap content to leverage ad revenue “ethically”? They can go pound sand as far as I’m concerned. There is great content in YouTube for sure but let’s face it, 99% is garbage designed to 1) latch on to popular trends to get more views and 2) use that to show ads and generate revenue for what’s essentially no content at all - just random garbage.
- antifa 3y ago
  Is it not safe to assume we're not watching the 99% of videos?
- Reubend 3y ago
  It's not productive to say that 99% of the people contributing content are making garbage. Even if that were true, the 1% of good creators are equally affected by a lack of ad revenue as the bad ones. The parent comment is basically pointing out that you're depriving the creators you watch of ad revenue. If you sponsor the creators you watch directly, that's great! But most people don't, and even for the people on HN I suspect that they watch a lot more different channels than just the ones they sponsor.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    These people are willing to contort themselves into a pretzel to justify getting something for nothing. They’re no different than people that show up to a restaurant, get an hours worth of good service from a waiter then tip them nothing (in the US) and claim they believe tipping is morally wrong and the system should be brought down. “No dude, you’re just a cheap bastard.”

jaredcwhite 3y ago

I'll have to go try this out again. Lately I've just been relying on Feedbin to let me watch subscribed channel videos (quite a nice experience actually), but that misses out on a number of features which I might be able to get from this.

Nextgrid 3y ago
Invidious can also provide RSS feeds, so you can keep using your RSS-based workflow with it.

ctoth 3y ago

This is cool but I never could figure out why it was named like an Imperial Star Destroyer.

effie 3y ago
adjective (of an action or situation) likely to arouse or incur resentment or anger in others. "she'd put herself in an invidious position" synonyms: unpleasant undesirable ungrateful Pretty apt name, considering what the software does.
- marc_abonce 3y ago
  TIL that invidious is an actual English word. I always suspected that it was video related pun, something like "in-videos".
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    The fact that the word also contains "vid" probably has something to do with why they picked that word for the project name, in addition to the actual meaning of the word.
shiroiuma 3y ago
>why it was named like an Imperial Star Destroyer What's wrong with that? The world would be better IMO if more software projects had names fitting of the ships of the Galactic Imperial Navy. Say what you want about the Empire's treatment of the many worlds under its control, but they're really good at things like naming ships as well as having good-looking starships and uniforms.

tiltowait 3y ago

Using Kagi, I set up a domain redirect to point youtube.com search results to an Invidious instance. Works great.

torartc 3y ago

It’s fine but at least try with the ui. It’s like they spent 2 min on it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
betamaxthetape 3y ago
No, please, the UI is one of the best things about it. I can run YouTube on my 20-year-old iMac G4 (PowerPC G4 processor, 1GB of RAM) and it ... just works. Most other sites fail completely - Gmail Basic HTML view and Hacker News being two notable exceptions.
- torartc 3y ago
  I personally don’t understand the desire to have an ugly tool just because it’s minimal. You can have minimal and not have it be ugly.
- pathartl 3y ago
  Can your 20 year old Mac even decode high definition H.264/5 videos?
pathartl 3y ago
Truly built by engineers
- syncbehind 3y ago
  I mean, it's open source. Don't like it? You can fork it and create something better.
  - torartc 3y ago
    Sure, but if you want people to use it, you could also just spend an additional day to make it look decent instead of expecting a fork to do it.

mpitt 3y ago

Interesting, from the doc[1]: "Because of various issues Invidious must be restarted often, at least once a day, ideally every hour." [1] https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#post-install-configuration https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#post-install-configu... I guess it's related to this issue, a memory leak (or probably multiple): https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1438 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1438 Also interesting that the issue is almost 3 years old and mentions even older reports.

RockRobotRock 3y ago
Getting invidious to run was a gigantic pain for me. It definitely consumed all my RAM and crashed my system at least once.
- turtlebits 3y ago
  Odd, I have the docker image running on a cheap 4gb VPS and it's been rock solid so far (set it up about a week ago).
- toastercat 3y ago
  It was definitely a pain in the ass before the official docker image. Have you tried that?
  - RockRobotRock 3y ago
    Thank you! I'll try the Docker image.
    - toastercat 3y ago
      No problem. And I meant to mention the Docker Compose config they have here [0]. This is what I use to self-host on my Raspberry Pi, and it works great. Just make sure to add a cron job that restarts the container every hour to get around the memory leak issue (my cron job is literally /bin/docker restart <container_name>) [0] https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#docker https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#docker

rorychatt 3y ago

Is this legal? In Google's Terms and Conditions, it's says that bypassing ads violates Youtube's terms and conditions. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en#:~:text=When%20you%20block%20YouTube%20ads,sign%20up%20for%20YouTube%20Premium https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en#:~:....

RockRobotRock 3y ago
Nope! The real question is who cares or is willing to do something about it.
EMIRELADERO 3y ago
It is legal, Invidious hasn't signed that agreement and doesn't use YouTube's API. They got a legal letter from YouTube[0] to which they responded publicly. > "They don't understand that we never agreed to any of their TOS/policies, they don't understand that we don't use their API." [0] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872
- abnry 3y ago
  Isn't using the website kind of like using an API?
  - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
    They refer to the registration-gated "Developer API"
    - rorychatt 3y ago
      I'm not sure. IANAL, but reading the developer policy, reference is made to include the Youtube Developer Site & Services, but is not exclusive of other Youtube API Services. Whether Invidious uses a Public Developer API, a Broker offering their own API, or a workaround with an internal API seems inconsequential. https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-policies#definition-youtube-api-services https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici... # Client: `"API Client" means a website or software application (including a mobile application) developed by you that accesses or uses the YouTube API Services.` # Service: "YouTube API Services" means (i) the YouTube API services (e.g., YouTube Data API service and YouTube Reporting API service) made available by YouTube including those YouTube API services made available on the YouTube Developer Site (as defined below), (ii) documentation, information, materials, sample code and software (including any human-readable programming instructions) relating to YouTube API services that are made available on https://developers.google.com/youtube or by YouTube, (iii) data, content (including audiovisual content) and information provided to API Clients (as defined above) through the YouTube API services (the "API Data"), and (iv) the credentials assigned to you and your API Client(s) by YouTube or Google." I'm not sure how I feel about software that sits on this grey line of legality sitting on the front page of HN.

smashah 3y ago

The tech industry failed the invidious team and other projects like this. This should be 100% legal and allowed based on a right-to-mod precedent but not lawyer is willing to take it that far because this is open source. This project gives control back to the user. It shouldn't be a grey zone and it shouldn't put maintainers at risk to work on it. Till this issue is resolved, OSS projects like this are unsustainable. Some evil megacorp is already carpet bombing maintainers with C&Ds and there is ZERO help for this.

Sabinus 3y ago
"Some evil megacorp is already carpet bombing maintainers with C&Ds and there is ZERO help for this." Is it possible or realistic for a code host to not care about US copyright laws and for developers to contribute anonymously?
- callalex 3y ago
  It’s certainly possible, but going down that path sounds like a good way to end up like Aaron Schwartz.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    I don't really see how. I think it's more like a good way to end up like Dmitry Sklyarov.
    - trimethylpurine 3y ago
      In that case, the software developer dropped charges because the circumvention wasn't available in the US. That was lucky for Dmitry, because they might have still won civil damages even if he was not charged criminally. Would Google drop the case? I'm not convinced they have any reason to. I wouldn't take the risk. But, I'm not a lawyer. Regardless, this clearly is available in the US, and provides circumvention to US users via an Iceland (EU) server. This is not similar to Dmitry's case.
- qweqwe14 3y ago

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago

I’ve been seeing Crystal pop up more and more lately, I want to dive back into that again.

mikebelanger 3y ago
Yeah, me too. I was checking out the Lucky framework the other day. At least on paper, it looks impressive.

silenced_trope 3y ago

How does this work? I just installed, then uninstalled, the Chrome (Brave) extension that is supposed to redirect videos to some invidious instance. I use Brave and am now seeing the "sorry you can't watch YouTube" anymore sign because Brave blocks ads. I thought installing the extension from the website would just redirect whatever video I clicked on to the mirrored video on an Invidious instance, is that not the case?

stevefan1999 3y ago

Can I have high-availability and load balance support so that I can virtually host them over a Kubernetes cluster?

unixfox 3y ago
There is an helm chart: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/tree/master/kubernetes https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/tree/master/kubernetes

aitchnyu 3y ago

Does Invidious in Firefox allow more than 720p? Seems I cant get any higher resolution.

jraph 3y ago
You gave me doubt, I just checked and 1080p is available on Firefox in my private Invidious instance.
Tmpod 3y ago
You need to enable the DASH format in the settings if it isn't already, I think.
caeruleus 3y ago
AFAIK you have to select DASH as your preferred video quality (or append &quality=dash) for other resolutions to work. It's not enabled by default because the server has to proxy the video (CORS): https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/177#issuecomment-423843512 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/177#issuecomment-...
- aitchnyu 3y ago
  Thanks, pruned my list to instances that allow DASH.

nikisweeting 3y ago

There is a great list of many alternative frontends I found here: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends They work well for internet archiving too, e.g. when Twitter or Reddit are being annoying and showing popups/login redirects/etc. you can replace the URL with an alternative frontend version and archive the content without the cruft.

danhau 3y ago
Thank you! This is great.
JeremyNT 3y ago
See also farside [0], which maintains a list of functional instances of alternate frontends, and can redirect links to a working instance automatically. [0] https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/ https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/

thomasfl 3y ago

I just love the domain name of this Invidious powered website https://yewtu.be https://yewtu.be.

zoobab 3y ago
Belgians to the rescue (tm)

zoobab 3y ago

Anyone to help porting it to WASM?

ode 3y ago

Why are there no alternative front ends to Instagram? I know there was one previously that shut down but no more have popped up.

prmoustache 3y ago
I think the main difference is youtube gives you access to nearly everything without a login while instagram does not. Having said that there are some web pages allowing you to browse "public" instagram accounts outside of the instagram page but I guess they rely on tons of short lived bot accounts.
highbaser 3y ago
There was Barinsta which Meta DMCA'd down and threatened to sue its developer if Barinsta is not removed and discontinued. As is always the case, the developer got scared, had complied and these news spread across the community, so now there might be less developers who dare to publish an alternative, even less to put a lot of work into something that will be rewarded with threats and lawsuits. The reason why there's no alternative to Instagram is corporate arrogance. That is a common phenomenon at corporate giants like Meta.

walteweiss 3y ago

I wonder if my iPad 3 story with YouTube¹ can be fixed here, with this service 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37700283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37700283

unixfox 3y ago
You can try, invidious support old devices.

gsuuon 3y ago

How exactly does this work? I guess it's not just showing embedded players for video. Is it scraping comments?

gorenb 3y ago

i’ve been using this for over a year, and it’s honestly really amazing.

sylware 3y ago

Yep, those are corner stones to interoperability with noscript/basic (x)html browsers, which should be supported by the actual web sites in a best effort scenario (and should be mandatory for tons of administrative online services or core online services). But many toxic coders working there are actively making their "web interface" ultra hard dependent on running javascript code in the client, for instance with extremely volatile and complex web browser fingerprinting. For instance, the new kick.com which will "javascript check your web browser", and you better have a Big Tech web engine... Don't be fooled on where the real evil is... Interoperability of Big Tech with Small Tech is prime. Only hardcore regulation can do it and it must expect the worst: Big Tech shadow-hiring hacker teams to give hell to Big Tech alternatives.

webdoodle 3y ago

Why would I use this over YoutubeDL hosted on a low power device like a NUC or Raspberry PI?

panki27 3y ago
Invidious is a web frontend. YoutubeDL is a downloader. So I don't really see what your question is getting at.

_chu1 3y ago

Great way to watch YouTube at school when the main site is blocked btw