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YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
- neurostimulant 3y agoYouTube revanced seems to be broken as well. all videos have been replaced with a video playing "not available on this app" over black background.
- ruined 3y agothis happens every few weeks. wait for the update, or contribute
- lagrange77 3y agoThis is the first time i witnessed, that every single instance doesen't work. Did that happen before?
- boarush 3y agoGoing through the linked issue, it seems that the fix has already been merged and should be part of the next invidious release. But it still is a fact that Google is trying to limit access to YouTube through alternatives like yt-dlp and invidious by constantly trying to break stuff.
- userbinator 3y agoby constantly trying to break stuff. It's long been known that Google's weapon is change; they've been doing that with web "standards" too. For YouTube, I guess the next stage in the cat-and-mouse game is to automate fixing it, and I even dare say that this new AI stuff might come in handy for that.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago> by constantly trying to break stuff. > > Google's weapon The culture I find myself in, in 2024, is one of war; unrecognisable from anything I've seen in "peaceful civilian life" before. It has no resemblance to business, to markets, to value, to a lawful society of fairness, utility and cohesion. What happened to us?
- nativeit 3y agoI don’t think anything happened to us, so much as your memory is flawed. We’ve never evolved beyond base self-interest, we’ve just become much more productive at extracting value from every aspect of life.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago(Edited) I'm genuinely sorry for you that you feel your culture has become nothing but an extractive free-for-all. There remain people who still aspire to treating others as ends and not means. Extraction is not productivity. To produce is to create. Your comment kinda validates what I was hinting at more though; that BigTech now sees itself as in all-out "do what though wilt" conflict with the civil population. It's a cyber war in all but name - though we still pretend it's "business". At some point the population are going to figure the rules have changed. From that point I'd give FAANG a few months to a year. Most analysts have figured that a cyber war would be inter-national rather than intra/civil conflict. We'll need a backup plan for Google/Microsoft etc unless they're radically neutralised (by government breakup or similar)
- miki123211 3y agoMy hypothesis is that Invidious is small, unimportant and unprofitable enough that Google just does nothing to care for it. It's not being tested, there's no QA, and the impact on Invidious isn't considered at all when planning API changes. If you're taking a walk in the forest, you don't care if you're crushing insects under your feet. You do nothing to deliberately crush them, but you don't walk extremely slowly all the time in case there's an insect nearby.
- rwmj 3y agoyt-dlp is still working for me, and when/if Google ever break that, I'll stop watching youtube.
- RamRodification 3y agoHow are you using it? If you come across a youtube link, do you run yt-dlp on the command line and then watch the downloaded file in a media player? Asking because I'm too lazy for that, and interested to know if there is some fancier way.
- eptcyka 3y agompv $youtubeLink
- Deukhoofd 3y agoI often use mpv with a yt-dlp hook, which means I can basically just do ``mpv youtube.com/watch/whatever``, and stream the video in mpv.
- stavros 3y agoI love that, but lately it seems to freeze a few seconds into the video.
- RamRodification 3y ago
- wazoox 3y agoyt-dlp and NewPipe still work though.
- GTP 3y agoYes, the problem seems to only affect public instances, the Invidous' developers suggest running an instance locally to avoid the issue.
- 3np 3y agoBeen running a non-public Piped instance for a couple of years now. There are videos where it works and videos where it doesn't. It's been a few months now where some proportion of videos fail to play over Piped no matter what (the same videos will fail across public instances too) and anecdotally that percentage has increased recently.
- lagrange77 3y agoFrom the article: > It is likely that existing alternatives and new alternatives will see huge user jumps when that happens. I've heard that often and i'm pessimistic about it in general. Although there might be some hope, because the channels Invidious users might prefer (nerd stuff) are more likely to move to an alternative, than others.
- tomrod 3y agoGoogle really needs to revamp their YouTube model. I'd sign up for an embedding API with a low user fee (~$0.50) and generous low volume (free) and reasonable high volume (>50k requests/month at $0.01/1k). Ad free, of course, because YouTube ads are probably not great money makers for small businesses, hence the awful commercials we see pushed and successful creators reliance on in-video promotions.
- izacus 3y agoWhy would that make sense for them?
- PBnFlash 3y agoThey are artificially suppressing the api value by banning uses people want. If people want to opt out of the recommendation engine and ads that makes hosting cheaper and easier for YouTube. They only do it to leverage market position and imo that's bad.
- lokar 3y agoWhat factors do you think drives their cost? I doubt it’s recommends. The ads help fund payments to top creators which in turn drives usage.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mike_d 3y agoYouTube streamed 21,885,984,000,000 minutes of content in 2023 and made $31.5 billion, which works out to an average of $0.0014 cents per minute. If you'd be willing to pay more than that to watch videos I am sure they'd take your money.
- nielsole 3y agoGiven your numbers, you are off by 100x. 31.5 billion / 21,885,984,000,000 minutes is 0.14 ct/minute.
- mappu 3y agoIt's already fixed - https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4552 https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4552
- politelemon 3y agoSomeone says the fix is very clever but what did they do? I just see CgIIAdgDAQ%3D%3D
- mike_d 3y agoA parameter was changed from '2AMBCgIQBg' to 'CgIIAdgDAQ%3D%3D' which is just the correct base64 encoding they should have been using the entire time. I don't think this was a hostile action by Google. An engineer probably just fixed a bug with input validation which broke the malformed requests Invidious was sending. https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=URL_Decode()From_Base64('A-Za-z0-9%2B/%3D',true,false)To_Base64('A-Za-z0-9%2B/%3D')&input=Q2dJSUFkZ0RBUQ https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=URL_Decode()From_Ba...
- nneonneo 3y agohttps://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js/pull/624 https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js/pull/624 has a bit more information - looks like this is just updating an internal parameter (maybe to match what the real client does)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xyst 3y agoI wonder how long it took G to push out this breaking change. I wonder if there will ever be a point where G will just give up. The fight between G and alternative front ends reminds me of the over engineered solution by NYC MTA to prevent people from hopping the turnstile. They invested some millions of dollars into building and deploying the system. Only for the system to be a very mild deterrent which can be easily fooled.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882455
- stavros 3y agoHow does Piped compare to Invidious? Piped seems to have SponsorBlock built-in, which seems like a great idea.
- Athoy 3y ago[flagged]
- protiva 3y ago[flagged]
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- brokenmachine 3y agoGoogle could break all of the unofficial clients if it wanted. This is just google being google and changing stuff.