This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If you're on desktop, download FreeTube. No more ads, ever. No more jittery youtube videos even though you have 300mbs down, you can download any video in app at max speeds, and its not algorithm fed. I imported my subscriptions, and now if I want to see something new I can use the not broken search function. Its like early early youtube and its wonderful!
I still use yt-dlp to download because I don't understand Freetube's options. It's either only audio or video
Also if you're on Linux and you get a white screen during playback (has been an issue since 0.22) this fix works for me: freetube --enable-features=''
edit: posting a vertical pic messes up the webpage a bit. If it's annoying tell me
Seconded. Tis a beautiful experience. And if you are currently using FreeTube, please throw a donation their way. They are putting a lot of work in to this app.
With the recent major update, Freetube implemented a new player which I like much better than the old one. With the new player, all keyboard shortcuts work well, that's great for me because my Home Theatre PC is controlled by a wireless keyboard+touchpad.
Freetube is great but it's also a source of endless frustration. Like if you walk away from your computer the stream times out and it won't resume. Then it says "reload" and they never implemented a reload button so you have to navigate to something else. Except their navigation doesn't work quite right so sometimes if you click too fast it stays on the new page after you try to go back to the one you wanted to reload. Rawr. (GitHub issues 1005, 1425, 1500, 1958, 4062, 4409, 5019, 5152, 6136, 6201)
I use youtube-local which is great, but it's more susceptible to breakage which is why I'm currently back on freetube and very very very frustrated.
In Freetube, reload is ctrl-R on Linux and Windows, and cmd-R on Mac. I have experienced the fact that if you leave a video paused for a long time (hours) then you need to refresh. If you have history active, after refreshing the video will resume from where you left, which by the way is better then actual YouTube where it will often resume from an earlier timestamp. I have not experienced the other issues you mentioned.
Yeah I learned that when I looked up the issue number, very disappointed that it's Ctrl+R instead of the canonical reload button for the last 30 years (F5). :(
Since you knew Ctrl+r you wouldn't experience those issues. That's a side effect of "reload" without a reload button.
Control r is standard reload for web browsers and other stuff too
But since F5 is and has been for 30 years the universal refresh button I never needed to learn that some software uses a different, undiscoverable key combination.
There's no reload button directly in the UI, but if you press alt and then go to View > Reload or View > Force Reload. It's not ideal, but it does work.
Edit: Didn't finish reading your comment, I've never experienced any of those issues, especially with navigation.
Thank you so much. Youtube hasn't been playing videos past the 1:00 mark and idk why.
Grayjay by futo just released a desktop app.
If the garbage takes itself out, I won't complain. YT doesn't see how the cable companies dying is the exact same future it is racing to emulate.
Fun fact, it seems this ban is IP based. (they're still testing in waves with a subset of overall users)
I switched to a new IP with my VPN, and while still signed in to the same YouTube account on the same video without ever clearing my cache or cookies, the block disappeared.
Genius work from the developers over at YouTube.
I think that's probably because ublock fixed the filters while u were doing this.
It was early yesterday, before filters had been updated, 30 seconds after a full purge and re-selecting of all relevant filter lists, done within the span of 2 minutes, so I doubt it was those.
If a million porn sites can make streaming video work, then YouTube is replaceable.
rumble, banned.video - it's just people don't upload stuff there
Rumble are also host to truth social and the worst of humanity.
AdGuard pro, SponsorBlock, DeArrow, and Untrap for YouTube. I only rarely ever see a brief part of a sponsor ad, and never see YouTube’s own ads.
Untrap lets you modify nearly anything about YouTube like even removing the view count and channel avatars, among many other options.
I've landed on that page a couple of times. I'm just waiting to be blocked.
I almost never watch videos on youtube because I download them and watch them locally. The two things that I use to download them are Downie (Mac) and yt-download (cross platform). This helps me avoid ads unless they are baked into the video. I also like to grab a bunch of content all at once and then watch at my leisure.
If you use yt-dlp you can save your subscriptions in a text file and download all their latest vids on a schedule.
Easy enough ChatGPT can write you this script and you may also find examples online.
If not directly useful for you, i am also putting this down for others. Do not let a monopoly dictate what is “the normal way” to do things.
What a great idea! I love Bash scripting, so I'll look into doing this myself for fun tomorrow.
I also like to grab a bunch of content all at once and then watch at my leisure.
If you're tech-inclined you might like pinchflat or Tube Archivist, which can archive channels/playlists in the background with video metadata automatically, which you can then use with JellyFin.
Need to be comfortable with /c/[email protected] type setups, however.
I’d vote for Pinchflat. Tube Archivist is good software but very heavy.
I run a Plex server for my movie and television library. I just watch YT videos once and delete them, mostly in the background while I do other things. But I'll look into both tools regardless because automation is always interesting to me. Thanks for the tips!
TubeArchivist is kind of an all-in-one software for you to watch YouTube videos in so its own web interface and is pretty heavy. But PinchFlat is very lightweight and is actually designed to be used with your Plex server being the medium you watch your videos on. So I’d recommend starting with the latter, as it’s kinda built for your exact use case.
I saw it and refreshed the ublock filters and everything works again
ad blocker detector blocker in filter list go brrr
