Many YT privacy frontends are down it seems. YouTube is cracking down on these servers fast. Both Invidious and Piped services are not working now.
So how are you watching videos now? Just plain youtube[dot]com with unblock and VPN?
I use https://freetubeapp.io/
I personally think Freetube is the best for desktop right now. Recently, there is also grayjay for desktop. The UI is still buggy IMO, but also seem promising.
But GreyJay isn’t libre.
That is a fair point. Source first software isn’t a part of FLOSS, but even in worst case scenarios it still can be considered as “source available”. Which is better in term of transparency compared to closed source App. OP asked for “private” way to watch Youtube not open source way, so I think grayjay could still be a great choice. We are talking about watching from YouTube which is a corpo closed source spyware anyway.
but wait a second. Privacy is good because it is a Freedom. And because it make Freedom as a whole more possible. But using software with which you have no freedom, kind of defeats the purpose. Like you gain +1 freedom points and lose -1 freedom points. It’s net zero.
Transparency is good to see privacy, but if it is not Libre, you are not gaining any freedom.
I just woke up, I don’t know if I am making any sense
FreeTube is a useful project as it allows you to “fallback” on a non-preferred frontend.
https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
This allows you to continue to use Youtube irregardless of which frontend is (potentially not) working.
In ‘Settings > General’ you’ll want to select “Invidious API” as your “Preferred API backend” and specify your favorite invidious instance in the “Current Invidious Instance” field and click “Set Current Instance as Default”. This locks FreeTube into the specified instance.
Then, when you notice that FreeTube is issuing notices to you about your favorite Invidious Instance being down, you can wander back to ‘Settings > General’; hit the “Clear Default Invidious Instance” Button and wait as FreeTube magically contacts the “https://api.invidious.io/” page for you and selects a new, and hopefully online and working Invidious instance. (You may have to hit this button several times to roll a working instance, Hit the button, check the subs page and see if everything loads, repeat if it falls back on the Local API.)
When you run into instances where you can’t roll up a good Invidious instance; the built in Local API is running a NewPipe Extractor like API directly from your FreeTube client. Not the best; but at least it keeps things working while you wait for the Invidious devs to fix things up; and it still reasonably preserves as much of your privacy as it can while doing this to the best effort it can.
…Sadly this doesn’t work when Google manages a double combo of breaking both Invidious and NewPipe; but I have found that this is less often the case and the devs of either project are usually fairly quick about getting fixes out. Bless their hard work with a donation sometime maybe, if you can.
Freetube and GrayJay
I’ve had a good experience with GrayJay. It’s a bit young and missing features but it’s never broken for me.
Btw, they also have a desktop app, but it’s currently in beta.
FreeTube is more stable for desktop.
I’ve been using their GrayJay desktop app, and I’ve enjoyed it so far.
I haven’t checked out FreeTube but maybe this is the push I need.
I’ve used it for a few days, but it lacks several fundamental features. Additionally, it’s quite resource-intensive.
I find it runs better then YouTube in Firefox on my crappy laptop
At this point we should just start torrenting YouTube. Like fuck YouTube.
At this point we should just ditch YouTube entirely, but alas.
I kinda assumed Vimeo would step up its social aspects when YouTube started ratcheting up its bullshit. Still waiting.
At this point we should just ditch YouTube entirely, but alas.
YouTube is great for downloading movie rips. They’re out there if you know where to look. When you download a movie on YouTube, you’re legally in the clear: Google is doing the copyright infringement. That’s one big advantage over torrents.
Yeah, but you can get movie rips off other places like archive.org. Also, in the US at least there’s not much of a penalty for consuming pirated content, only if you distribute it. The chance of that even happening is greatly reduced if you use a VPN.
ok.ru/video is better
I don’t know where to look. How can I find out?
Here’s how it works: people who want to upload movies on Youtube create innocuous-looking channels, upload 10 or 20 bullshit videos on them for a few months to make them look innocuous, then suddenly upload those big forbidden movies you want. Youtube doesn’t react rightaway - probably because the channels have been rated harmless by the algorithm over the previous months - and for a few hours to a few days, you can download the movies. Then Youtube takes notice of the traffic increase, takes a look and nukes the account. There are a gigantic number of those sleeper accounts waiting to be activated. They’re mostly created in upload farms in asia.
The trick is finding them. It’s a game of cat and mouse between Youtube and the uploaders, and you want to find the mouse before the cat does. For obvious reasons, the movies are rarely labeled exactly what you want (i.e. don’t look for “Dune 2”, you won’t find it). But there are several keywords you can use to at least find some of them, and then you can follow the Youtube suggestions until you spot the thumbnail of the movie you want. It may be called “This guys fights in the desert and wins” for example, but the thumbnail will unmistakably show some collage of Timothy Chalamen against the desert of Arrakis. Then you can use yt-dlp to download it. But do it quick before Youtube kills the channel.
As for the keywords that will take you easily to burner uploader accounts, my favorite ones are “Blockbusters” (or “Blockbuster movies”) for action movies (that will take you quickly to the same plethora of shitty Marvel, John Wick, Jason Stratham, Liam Neeson, Vin Diesel and Mission Impossible rehashes, so if you’re after something a bit more interesting, follow the suggestions) and “Harlock Space Pirate” to find animes. And for 80’s movies (yes, I’m from that time), I look for… “80s movies” 🙂 I usually don’t find what I want, but again, follow the suggestions.
Finally, to throw the Youtube algorithm, most of those poster also post movie snippets with well-known titles. Don’t get bogged down in those: look at long video and dismiss anything shorter than the running length of the movie you’re after. They won’t have the right title but they’ll have the right thumbnail.
Good luck 🙂
It works! I typed in “blockbuster” adjusted upload time filter to “today” and started scrolling. Just scroll past anything that is less than 1 h long, and you’ll find movies pretty easily.
Before long, I found a few movies that had very special names like: “Rotten Tomatoes Full Movie | Blockbuster Movie 2025 | Action Movies Hollywood 2025 in English 2160p” or “60’s Sci-fi | The Day Mars Invaded Earth | Full Movie”. I also tried a bunch of other related keywords like: “movie”, “hollywood” and “scifi”. Surprisingly, finding bollywood movies is very easy.
The only problem is that you’ll never know what you’ll find. If you want to watch jurassic park, you could search for “dinosaur movie”, but I couldn’t make that work. Searching by genre seems to work reasonably well, but you need to get creative with the keywords.
When you do find a movie, copy the name into a text file and start collecting these silly names. Pretty soon you’ll notice which words appear frequently, so start searching for those. There’s no single universal word that always works. Here’s are a few words that seems to work for me: Rotten Tomatoes, Full Movie, film, blockbuster, action movie, hollywood, 2160p, adventure, Thriller, mystery movie, free movie
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
There re a lot of free Movie channels, tolerated by YT, eg. Movie Dome (but Country restricted German, enough with an Proxie) and also some others in Spanish and English. Another possibility, outside of YT, for free movies live and on demand are Pluto TV and websites of Public TV channels. Free Movies are not a big problem in YT and online, only need to search a little. Alternatives to YT, well, maybe in near future Odysee respect content.
All the links you posted don’t work where I live, unsurprisingly.
And I’m talking big, recent releases, not B-movies from yesteryear: those are actively banned on YT, obviously. You can find them but they’re not supposed to be on YT.
Which links don’t work for you? Download FreeTube and SMplayer Search full movies in your language Watch thes as said Yes, there are also old B-Movies, but not only, I watched a lot of more recent movies, (Venom, Black Adams, Detective Dee, SWAT, Terminator (all), Spy,…) , alo not all older movies are bad (Hell Train (Script by Kurusawa), Speed, Dune 1+2, Most of Star Trek, Prey…). As said, search and you’ll find, there are tons of good free movies online
Well PeerTube is p2p like torrents are (but with a simple streaming web ui), so basically just run PeerTube
I love the idea of PeerTube it works really well the only problem is basically no one uploads to it so most of the people I want to watch just aren’t there.
I’d love to see someone operating some sort of PeerTube instance that basically acts as a temp cache for YT videos.
Like it could just store all the videos that we link-to from Lemmy and autodelete after 1 month.
I use grayjay as you can use a google account to bypass the “confirm your not a bot” but then have the ability to subscribe, comment, and save video playback without a google account.
Actually, I have never used piped and invidious to watch the videos themselves. I use them just as subscription feeds and in case I need to search for some video, then I toggle a script I have, I copy the links to the videos I want to watch and I untoggle the script. Then the links I copied start playing on mpv. I don’t like to overload piped and invidious services, which I would say is the main reason for them to be shut down, when I can watch/download the video through mpv-ytdlp on my own. Although, I don’t know if that answers your question.
Yes its okay if you’re using a VPN for downloading which makes your IP untraceable by Google Servers. Currently I am using freetube with VPN. But I need to choose a server that is not used by many for getting around ‘you need to sign in’ issue.
New pipe android app. Been using it for years with no issues accessing YouTube.
Same problem if you use a VPN or Tor
Close the door, turn off the lights, wear earbuds, pull a duvet over your head. Works every time. Might look a bit suspicious, but at least it’s private.
Seriously though, it’s getting pretty bad. I’m currently shifting my video watching habits away from YT. I have a feeling that sooner rather than later I may have to quit YT completely.
I’ve been avoiding Youtube content altogether, I ditched it completely.
However, it seems like yt-dlp does the job even when all Indivious instances are being blocked.
Reject inefficient video data transfer. Return to kb sized articles you can analyze at your own pace.
Sometimes (although rarely) I watch some videos on Odyssee. I try to avoid it too, because of some of its downsides, but it’s better than YouTube because it has no ads, no need for login to watch, and videos can be easily downloaded without complains from the platform.
However, yeah, texts are way better. Internet used to be textual. Text allows for personal annotations, just like the grand old book annotations.
Freetube and Grayjay. Grayjay has a desktop app now.
I signed up for PeerTube, uploaded all my videos there, and updated my old YT vid descriptions that say “can’t watch this video? Click here to view ad-free on PeerTube”
I download it with yt-dlp and watch it with a video player. that way they don’t know at what pace do I watch it (when do I rewind and pause, or speed up).
or grayjay when I remember that it exists.
other options for me include FreeTube and NewPipeOh yes. They don’t know the page… They do know what and what IP.
yeah unfortunately, but what can I do. you can’t download through inv/piped with yt-dlp anyway, because it just recognizes the youtube proxy and then goes direct to youtube
There are several way, honestly. For Android, there’s NewPipe. The app itself fetches the YouTube data. For PC, there are similar applications that do the same such FreeTube. Those are the solutions I recommend.
If you’re one of those, you can also host your own Invidious and/or Piped instances. But I like NewPipe and FeeTube better.
NewPipe needs VPN or Tor for privacy which usually gets blocked
I’ve used freetube for a while and it seems like it’s expierencing the same issues since I’ve been getting a lot of error messages lately.
FreeTube also is based on Invidious instances, changing the instance may work, but better to set the SMplayer as extern player, then you can open the Video in this player which works almost always.
Thank you for the tip. Hopefully that’ll fix the issues I’ve been having.
Yes, if you find a workng Invidious instance it’s ok, but if not, FreeTube without SMplayer is useless.
Really? It’s been working just fine for me.
i just search it on dukdukgo and use their viewer
Just firefox with ublock origin.
