LibreTube - uses Piped as video source by default. Subscriptions and playlists can be created, all without actually interacting with YouTube.
Clipious - uses Invidious as the video source. Also allows for subscribing and accounts. Lesser known client
NewPipe - Gets the source directly from YT. Allows for subscribing and creating playlists
Additionally, there’s also ReVanced that lets you patch the regular YT app to include useful features.
Grayjay is propertiary. Just giving a heads up
I thought it was FOSS? Here their GitHub. I’m not an expert in licenses and all that, but it looks like it has even been forked. You can’t even see proprietary, let alone fork it. I could be wrong, though. Correct me if I’m wrong, please.
It has a joke of a license that certainly isn’t free. It onky alpows you to see the source code aka it ia “source availible” not opwn source nor free
I see. I think Louis Rossmann (he works for Futo, the company behind this app and other FOSS apps) said in a video that they’ll eventually open source it? I don’t remember exactly.
Yup. And they still haven’t.
We need to hit him up about it on one of his videos. They do advocate for FOSS all the time. They even pay people create FOSS apps. Not sure why not this one.
I don’t like Louis enough to care enough sorry
Newpipe has to be the choice for android. Also, Tubular is a pretty neat fork that adds sponsorblock and return youtube dislike
Thank you so much for this. I have been using NewPipe sponsorblock and it’s been discontinued and haven’t been able to find anything else.
Tubular is actually the successor to NewPipe x SponsorBlock. It’s made by the same developer.
Ah, makes sense why it’s a carbon copy of it. Glad they’re back at it. I’m curious to know why change to a new app.
This needs to be higher.
FreeTube on Android? Where do I find that?
FreeTube Cordova it is called
I think I’ve seen it on f-droid before
I can’t seem to find it anymore :/
It’s in the IzzyOnDroid repo: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/io.freetubeapp.freetube
Thank you
FYI, SmartTubeNext has been renamed to just SmartTube.
Nice. Thanks for that. Let me fix my post.
I also want to drop Grayjay in here. It supports YouTube and can also be used to view other platforms like Twitch, Odysee, PeerTube, etc. It uses plugins, so you can develop a plugin for the video platform you want to be able to use in Grayjay. Grayjay also has this Polycentric “decentralized” database so that you can comment and like the videos in those aforementioned platforms.
It’s good and everything (although it was a bit rough around the edges here and there), but is a no-go for me personally, unless they’ve changed their license. When I last checked it wad not open source, but merely source available since the license basically said you’re not allowed to modify the source code period. AGPL would’ve been a far better choice
Totally understandable. I mean, it’s still in alpha and yes I do encounter bugs sometimes. I honestly just use it because I can have my feed in grayjay as well.
I use Tubular. It’s a fork of newpipe that has sponsor block.
Anyone know of something for Windows or Linux like grayjay that access multiple platforms?
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All I want is an ad-free YouTube app that lets me cast on Chromecast directly.
So far nothing worked properly. Any ideas? I’m using a Pixel 4A.
Grayjay, it has all those features.
I’ll give it a shot
GrayJay doesn’t cast to Chromecast, it uses F-Cast instead which isn’t on every platform.
Well I was able to cast on Chromecast. But it was a little unstable.
Not FOSS
Yeah, just OSS. Which is fine by me, frankly. In a capitalist system there are very few ways to make FOSS soft compete with closed source/proprietary. One way is to convince people to buy the soft. Another is to get industry funding. Blender is one of the best examples of this. But Grayjay can’t use the Blender model because the biggest player in the industry (Youtube) has a vested interest in keeping the app from being developed.
One way is to convince people to buy the soft.
Grayjay and other Futo apps are not really paid software, it’s more like a donation. No reason not to use a FOSS license.
But Grayjay can’t use the Blender model because the biggest player in the industry (Youtube) has a vested interest in keeping the app from being developed.
What does that have to do with the licensing? The restrictive definitely won’t stop Google from trying to shut the app down. Selling the app actually makes it harder to prevent it from being shut down. Google can now argue in court that Futo tries to make money from selling this app, that uses the YouTube API without authorization.
There’s a very easy solution to this problem: Just make it FOSS like every other god damn alternative YouTube client, put the GPL on it and treat donations like donations, instead of “selling” the app and generating revenue (which can and likely will be used against them).Rossmann and Futo have explicitly stated that purchasing their soft is a purchase, not a donation.
Furthermore, Grayjay does not use the Youtube API and so Google has no ground to stand on.
Rossmann and Futo have explicitly stated that purchasing their soft is a purchase, not a donation.
Exactly. That’s the issue. Selling software means generating revenue, thus Grayjay is a commercial product. That’s exactly what YouTube Vanced was shut down for. Generating revenue from accessing YouTube in an unauthorized manner. Grayjay does use the YouTube API, but not the official one. YouTube has 2 sets of APIs. The official one with clear terms and conditions, which is only accessible with an API token, and the unofficial one, which is for example used in the YouTube mobile app. There is no official documentation on this API, and it was only discovered through reverse engineering. YouTube doesn’t allow using this API from an unofficial client (they’re not that strict about it, but nonetheless, it’s technically forbidden, as the APi is not meant for public usage).
Unless they were to stick a TOS, usage agreement, or API key requirement on Innertube then anyone’s free to use it however they like. Legally, Grayjay is in the clear here. And practically they’re fine as well since altering Innertube to block Grayjay would mean that Google would have to alter their in house processes and that costs money.
Doesn’t ReVanced work?
Revanced casting doesn’t work for me
I’ve never had problems with it
SkyTube Extra has Cast support
I tried, it worked locally but I couldn’t cast on Chromecast
SkyTube Extra has Cast support
SkyTube Extra has Cast support
I use WebVideoCaster on roku for this.
But I don’t have Roku
Web Video Caster can cast to a large number of devices, Chromecast included. It has a lot of companion apps too on several smart TV platforms, all for the sake of getting your media played back on another device.
SkyTube Extra has Google Cast support, but make sure to download it from GitHub (e.g. through Obtainium). The F-Droid version doesn’t have the cast feature, because it depends on a proprietary Google library, which is not allowed on F-Droid.
I’ve been using pipe-viewer (formerly/alternatively youtube-viewer) for years. It’s an extremely minimal yet feature-rich and customizable perl youtube client, designed to be used without a google api key (If you want to use an account, use youtube-viewer instead). No other client I’ve tried comes close in my experience (I’ve tried Freetube (bloated), Minitube (buggy, feature incomplete, uses embedded player), Newpipe (restricted to android)).
Also works great on mobile, and can be used with a Gtk-perl client for people who want a graphical client. It can also be used with any native video player, like mpv or mplayer (and adding an unsupported player is trivial in the config).
Demo:
There’s also invidtui, which uses the Invidious API. You can simply use it with your favorite video player (e.g. mpv or VLC). Invidious is also very light on resources, so you could host your own instance. Even locally on your machine using Docker. Or go with youtube-local.
The borderless UI is so good, honestly. Do you know if there’s a way to alter the player control UI? Am wanting to get into ricing and that looks like it provides a great solution for some minimalist ideas I’m having.
The window decorations in my video are provided by cwm, not the player. The player UI is just default mpv.
Using Tubular, which is a fork of newpipe with sponsorblock integration. It’s a bit buggy but I like not having to skip every sponsor
youtube.com + firefox android/fennec + ublock origin + sponsorblock
A textfile with channel urls + a yt-dlp script + a self hosted jellyfin servers.
Saves on bandwidth too, you only download once and can keep your favorites saved offline as long as you have storage space.
I do run my own invidious client too for video searches and “filler” channels you watch selectively.
Oooh… I’d love a YouTube integration with jellyfin.
Tell me more.
I’d love the features of a podcast app but for YouTube creators I follow.
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You mean I finally have a way to watch Youtube in my Samsung TV without ads??? Ooooo I know what I’m doing tonight!
edit: naaah it won’t run on my raspberry :(
That’s exactly what i use if for. I do have a server-pc running though.
Yeah it requires a minimum of 2GB RAM. Maybe I’ll finally get that picobox
Wait, revanced works again?
Yes! Installing the latest version of microG from ReVanced’s github and repatching the app did the trick when it stopped working a couple months ago
My god, I am in tears. Praise the lords of FOSS.
Sure does. I’ve been using it for a few months.
Normal stopped a while ago but extended is working well
Regular ReVance works just fine. Installed it to my wife’s phone just earlier today.
I saw it had an update. For a little while it wasn’t working right so I swapped to extended and that’s been running fine.
It stopped working?
I have used it since vanced died and while it does occasionally break, all you usually need to do is download a new APK and repatch.
I’ll also plug SmartTube, an Android TV app that has many of the more widely-used functions ReVanced has (blocks ads, supports SponsorBlock, etc.) among other things.
This was me when Invidious and Piped were being attacked by Youtube and Newpipe had a hiatus.
Tubular is a Newpipe fork with Sponsor Block integrated for anyone interested.
That’s a sweet icon pack
Ty, the pack ia called Arcticons if you want to test it.
I’m having great time with FreeTube Cordova lately, you have to setup the UI initially, understanding its limit for mobile, but it works very well.
I would use Libretube, but it simply doesn’t work on my phone. On PC I always use piped.
Try enabling “Use HLS” inside:
3 dots > Settings > Audio and videoThanks. That fixed it.
Do you know, why this does fix the problem?
I was using LibreTube only as a music player and was a bit unreliable (sometimes it would crash or get stuck in infinite loading). Trying to use it for videos was impossible, since trying to skip even just 10s the video would load endlessly or just go black and freeze.
So I looked up on their github issue tracker and found this pinned.
Ah, thanks :)
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What’s the issue with piped?
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I think the issue is that the more users these instances have, the easier it is for them to get throttled/banned by the services they want to use. I self host piped and it works 99% of the times
Also some services are frequently changing stuff or just making it impossible to have an alternative frontends
Doing it wrong.
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Nome of the frontends you mentioned have apps.
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Same with all of these other frontends like invidious, teddit, rimgo, bibliogram,
This you?
Besides which… it’s well understood that all of these apps are brittle as in they stop working every other day when youtube changes whatever thing so they stop working.
In the case of newpipe for example, if you install from the app store or even f-droid the version there will be a few weeks old and just won’t work. The best approach is to install the apk and allow it to update itself when a new version is released. I’ve been using newpipe for several years in this manner and it’s very reliable.
Er go, if it doesn’t work for you, you’re doing it wrong.
Because it is not a pipe
Honestly where’s my pipe, this is false advertising
Just find a good instance like piped.adminforge.de or host your own
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I imagine you’re exaggerating but if not then I’d say that’s a tad extreme. That being said, their official setup guide does provide steps on how to install it but I think if I didn’t have prior experience with some of the software it mentions I think I’d struggle so maybe a different guide by someone else is better?
However these obviously require having something that this can be run on, like a VPS, which aren’t free, so that is another barrier for entry to consider.
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No, which I mentioned in my comment.
Still in development but Lighttube seems interesting and uses its own backend.
Libretube seems to almost never work for me no matter what instance i try.
Also worth adding Smarttube for AndroidTVTry enabling “Use HLS” inside:
3 dots > Settings > Audio and videoSee this.
