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Newpipe has always unreliable and prone to not working for me, unfortunately. Crashes. Youtube import gives just 4 subscriptions while I have hundreds and so on

Newpipe has always unreliable and prone to not working for me, unfortunately. Crashes. Youtube import gives just 4 subscriptions while I have hundreds and so on.

rldjbpin 3y ago
+1 after using piped and newpipe for 1.5+ years, it is not good enough to fully replace youtube app for me. although i believe it has been mostly on the server side and not as much on the client (besides random crashes that were happening when opening a "new" type of video in recent past). currently, most new videos of my subscriptions (manually added) do not show up on time. they often pop up in retrospect, maybe after another person has watched that video on the piped instance. on ios yattee allows use of both invidious and piped instances and the difference in reliability is night and day between the two. i truly hope the project makes further strides in and achieve a stable experience.
the_third_wave 3y ago
Did you send crash reports, report the problem with the missing subscriptions, maybe even have a go at finding the cause if you happen to be versed in the technology? I've never seen it crash [1] on any of my devices so I can add that piece of anecdata to yours. I'm not a heavy Newpipe user since I run my own Invidious instance which offers close to the same functionality (minus playing in the background since that needs to be implemented on the device while Invidious is a web service) but for those times I do use Newpipe it works well. On those odd instances it doesn't load the video the solution tends to be an upgrade away. [1] as in 'the app crashes', not 'the video does not play', the former is a crash while the latter is an incompatibility with Youtube and tends to be solved by upgrading Newpipe.
- Sakos 3y ago
  It crashed multiple times daily when I tried it a few months back. Same thing on my partner's phone.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  I feel bad now for posting something negative, it's just a spontaneous report of me trying to use it. Since I've never successfully stepped over to using it and become a user, I don't report bugs either. I've simply been curious to try, but content with youtube (mobile web version)
csydas 3y ago
Can you elaborate ont he crashes more? when i still had an android phone newpipe was the only app i actively enjoyed using because it was just reliable and simple. the only issues i ever had were the same everyone had when youtube broke the functionality and usually there was a dev build ready in a few hours with a patch and then a proper update pretty shortly after on the main app. but i never used it to sign in to youtube so might be a difference. i specifically chose newpipe because i didn’t need to deal with google’s nonsense when using it
- interloxia 3y ago
  I have had a lot of ui crashes unrelated to YouTube over the years. Perhaps similar to the f-droid client. Not enough that it's unusable, mostly, but enough to try to avoid it either by suffering through ads or using an alternative. For example, this release fixes a foreground service crash that made background play unusable for me for a while.
- pydry 3y ago
  I had a lot more crashes until I started using the official newpipe repository. The fdroid version lags by a few days. I think it should just be taken off fdroid.
- autoexec 3y ago
  I'm using an old version (2.5.2) and just opening a video will cause an error ("Sorry, something went wrong" banner) but the video still plays so I don't care. rarely the whole thing will crash, but I've only seen that after hours of abuse (hundreds of videos viewed/downloaded) The only other problem I regularly see are queued downloads being suddenly/silently deleted which is frustrating because you have to try to remember what it was you'd queued up. Maybe that's been fixed already?
ksjskskskkk 3y ago
every single newpipe problem is google actively breaking them. every time it crashed failing to parse some video is even more reason to use it!
- vanderZwan 3y ago
  I mean, I'm sure there's also still plain old bugs from human error in there. But yes, if it breaks on YT specifically it's almost always due to YT.
FireInsight 3y ago
I used Newpipe first after degoogling, then switch to Libretube for the supposed privacy benefits. App looked a bit better too and crashed often, but way too often there were problems with connecting the Piped instances it was using for streaming and it was laggy and slowly. Newpipe, conversely, when it works, is fast. Sometimes it crashes repeatedly but the problems are usually resolved quickly. Streaming is good quality and fast.
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
I really hope "Fix app not responding, background app crashes and issues with starting the player" actually addresses the issue. Getting an ANR popup and having to either dismiss it every 15 seconds or kill the app, search again for your video, and hope it doesn't happen again is a horrible experience. The only other experience-breaking issue I ran into is lack of support for multiple language tracks, which also seems fixed :)
iforgotpassword 3y ago
I've switched to it maybe two months ago and use it in foreground and background mode, tried pip mode once or twice. But I'm using it almost every day. I had maybe four or five crashes so far, nothing that comes even close to the annoyance of YouTube's ad rate nowadays.
- imglorp 3y ago
  Solid for me. Also it's not just the ad rate but also the recommendation drek: it's hard to follow subscriptions even, in the yt app or Web client.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  Why I cope with youtube: adblocker ensures no ads and addon enables background play. Firefox on Android.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Newpipe is much nicer in interface than youtube in firefox
    - kzrdude 3y ago
      With the new version I think it's a contender. Now the playlists per channel are available, which is essential.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    I didn't really like having YouTube be just another tab in my browser on mobile, it seemed too clunky. So until I switched, I didn't want to bother with 3rd party apps, since the experience a few years ago was horrible (forgot which ones I tried though). Also I had that little bit of respect to support creators by not blocking ads. But when there's two unskippable 15 second ads before a 7 second shitpost video, at some point enough is enough. So while I mostly just switched because of the ads, what really was a huge improvement to me was how every time I tap a YouTube link now (messenger, browser, mail), I get a nice pop-up from NewPipe asking whether I want to play it right away in the app, play it right away but just audio in the background, or enqueue it (if something's already playing). It's a small detail but it's such an improvement over "just interrupt the current video without asking".
lupusreal 3y ago
Yt-dlp is still the gold standard, but in my experience newpipe's reliability has improved in the past year or two.
- opan 3y ago
  Gonna piggyback off this comment to say that although this sounds barely relevant (cli tool vs android app) at a glance, you can actually use both yt-dlp and mpv in termux for playing audio on android as well. If you throw a comment at the end of the mpv command with artist/song-name then it's very fast to find with the ctrl-r reverse shell history search. Arguably faster than opening Newpipe and checking your history or playlists. Speaking of playlists, you could have .m3u files of URLs for mpv to play in termux as well.
orangepurple 3y ago
Start the app and play something through one bluetooth device. Pause, then connect to another bluetooth device. App won't play videos and bugs out.

Newpipe has always unreliable and prone to not working for me, unfortunately. Crashes. Youtube import gives just 4 subscriptions while I have hundreds and so on.

rldjbpin 3y ago

+1 after using piped and newpipe for 1.5+ years, it is not good enough to fully replace youtube app for me. although i believe it has been mostly on the server side and not as much on the client (besides random crashes that were happening when opening a "new" type of video in recent past). currently, most new videos of my subscriptions (manually added) do not show up on time. they often pop up in retrospect, maybe after another person has watched that video on the piped instance. on ios yattee allows use of both invidious and piped instances and the difference in reliability is night and day between the two. i truly hope the project makes further strides in and achieve a stable experience.

the_third_wave 3y ago

Did you send crash reports, report the problem with the missing subscriptions, maybe even have a go at finding the cause if you happen to be versed in the technology? I've never seen it crash [1] on any of my devices so I can add that piece of anecdata to yours. I'm not a heavy Newpipe user since I run my own Invidious instance which offers close to the same functionality (minus playing in the background since that needs to be implemented on the device while Invidious is a web service) but for those times I do use Newpipe it works well. On those odd instances it doesn't load the video the solution tends to be an upgrade away. [1] as in 'the app crashes', not 'the video does not play', the former is a crash while the latter is an incompatibility with Youtube and tends to be solved by upgrading Newpipe.

Sakos 3y ago
It crashed multiple times daily when I tried it a few months back. Same thing on my partner's phone.
kzrdude 3y ago
I feel bad now for posting something negative, it's just a spontaneous report of me trying to use it. Since I've never successfully stepped over to using it and become a user, I don't report bugs either. I've simply been curious to try, but content with youtube (mobile web version)

csydas 3y ago

Can you elaborate ont he crashes more? when i still had an android phone newpipe was the only app i actively enjoyed using because it was just reliable and simple. the only issues i ever had were the same everyone had when youtube broke the functionality and usually there was a dev build ready in a few hours with a patch and then a proper update pretty shortly after on the main app. but i never used it to sign in to youtube so might be a difference. i specifically chose newpipe because i didn’t need to deal with google’s nonsense when using it

interloxia 3y ago
I have had a lot of ui crashes unrelated to YouTube over the years. Perhaps similar to the f-droid client. Not enough that it's unusable, mostly, but enough to try to avoid it either by suffering through ads or using an alternative. For example, this release fixes a foreground service crash that made background play unusable for me for a while.
pydry 3y ago
I had a lot more crashes until I started using the official newpipe repository. The fdroid version lags by a few days. I think it should just be taken off fdroid.
autoexec 3y ago
I'm using an old version (2.5.2) and just opening a video will cause an error ("Sorry, something went wrong" banner) but the video still plays so I don't care. rarely the whole thing will crash, but I've only seen that after hours of abuse (hundreds of videos viewed/downloaded) The only other problem I regularly see are queued downloads being suddenly/silently deleted which is frustrating because you have to try to remember what it was you'd queued up. Maybe that's been fixed already?

ksjskskskkk 3y ago

every single newpipe problem is google actively breaking them. every time it crashed failing to parse some video is even more reason to use it!

vanderZwan 3y ago
I mean, I'm sure there's also still plain old bugs from human error in there. But yes, if it breaks on YT specifically it's almost always due to YT.

FireInsight 3y ago

I used Newpipe first after degoogling, then switch to Libretube for the supposed privacy benefits. App looked a bit better too and crashed often, but way too often there were problems with connecting the Piped instances it was using for streaming and it was laggy and slowly. Newpipe, conversely, when it works, is fast. Sometimes it crashes repeatedly but the problems are usually resolved quickly. Streaming is good quality and fast.

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

I really hope "Fix app not responding, background app crashes and issues with starting the player" actually addresses the issue. Getting an ANR popup and having to either dismiss it every 15 seconds or kill the app, search again for your video, and hope it doesn't happen again is a horrible experience. The only other experience-breaking issue I ran into is lack of support for multiple language tracks, which also seems fixed :)

iforgotpassword 3y ago

I've switched to it maybe two months ago and use it in foreground and background mode, tried pip mode once or twice. But I'm using it almost every day. I had maybe four or five crashes so far, nothing that comes even close to the annoyance of YouTube's ad rate nowadays.

imglorp 3y ago
Solid for me. Also it's not just the ad rate but also the recommendation drek: it's hard to follow subscriptions even, in the yt app or Web client.
kzrdude 3y ago
Why I cope with youtube: adblocker ensures no ads and addon enables background play. Firefox on Android.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Newpipe is much nicer in interface than youtube in firefox
  - kzrdude 3y ago
    With the new version I think it's a contender. Now the playlists per channel are available, which is essential.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  I didn't really like having YouTube be just another tab in my browser on mobile, it seemed too clunky. So until I switched, I didn't want to bother with 3rd party apps, since the experience a few years ago was horrible (forgot which ones I tried though). Also I had that little bit of respect to support creators by not blocking ads. But when there's two unskippable 15 second ads before a 7 second shitpost video, at some point enough is enough. So while I mostly just switched because of the ads, what really was a huge improvement to me was how every time I tap a YouTube link now (messenger, browser, mail), I get a nice pop-up from NewPipe asking whether I want to play it right away in the app, play it right away but just audio in the background, or enqueue it (if something's already playing). It's a small detail but it's such an improvement over "just interrupt the current video without asking".

lupusreal 3y ago

Yt-dlp is still the gold standard, but in my experience newpipe's reliability has improved in the past year or two.

opan 3y ago
Gonna piggyback off this comment to say that although this sounds barely relevant (cli tool vs android app) at a glance, you can actually use both yt-dlp and mpv in termux for playing audio on android as well. If you throw a comment at the end of the mpv command with artist/song-name then it's very fast to find with the ctrl-r reverse shell history search. Arguably faster than opening Newpipe and checking your history or playlists. Speaking of playlists, you could have .m3u files of URLs for mpv to play in termux as well.

orangepurple 3y ago

Start the app and play something through one bluetooth device. Pause, then connect to another bluetooth device. App won't play videos and bugs out.