Freetube is working again!
FreeTube - The Private YouTube Client
A massive thanks to @LuanRT for providing the fix regarding to the extraction of the deciphering functions. Also, big thanks to @PikachuEXE for coming up with a potential alternative solution!
Yes! The Freetube team are real heroes, and really keep up with the cat and mouse of it all at S-tier on all fronts, including even getting updates into flathub promptly, which not every project is good about.
Every time freetube is broken, I have to use grayjay interim, which pushes a fix almost immediately, while freetube takes a couple of days.
Yeah, I mean, there are other ways, like STube on Android, which I think is a one man band but is always faster, but it's not even so much about even just watching, Freetube is a great overall management experience for keeping track sans Google like nothing else with history and export et al across all platforms basically. I'm constantly impressed by them.
Yay! I realized yesterday too. They are real heroe. Also, if the project dies at somepoint (likely due to YT hunting them and making their site even worse, I guess it's time to stop relying in their crap and use real alternatives like Odysee and Peertube
Just in case anyone is curious:
If you navigate to "actions" on the github, you can download nightly versions that have the fixes days before the release is done.
I was having issues with it the other day, and so I pasted the URL into my browser and it would not let me watch past 1 min of any video without disabling ublock.
Needless to say, I didn't watch the video. I'm done with using YouTube in any official way. If they successfully remove all options for avoiding ads on their site, then I will just never go there again.
Same. I've been tentatively exploring podcasts, since most of what I used YouTube for was listening to videos to get to sleep at night. It would be exciting if Peertube use picked up because of this, though.
Unfortunately the only invidious instance I've been able to rely on doesn't enable the API endpoints. The admin is a real trooper though. I'm not sure if it's the flagship.
Check out the workaround with an external player. It worked for me during the time friend didn't work the past few days.
The external player thing has never worked for me, at least when I set it to VLC, which just displays an error. I must be missing something.
Edit: thanks for the replies, next time I'll try mpv and/or haruna
I think I either tried that or didn't want to bother lol. I guess it felt slightly less janky to click on another backend on nadeko. Gonna update freetube for sure though. I probably shouldn't care to proxy videos that much.
Yay!!! Great news everyone
I'm not understanding why it doesn't work when I turn on my VPN, though. Is there a way to watch Youtube and have the VPN on?
Yes, that should work, I believe, though I am no expert. I watch YT via Freetube with my VPN on most of the time, and right now too. I use Mozilla VPN if that matters and have it connected to just some other US city, but as always, YMMV.
I'm using Private Internet Access. It's weird, because as soon as I turn it on, FreeTube fails to play anything.
It's still not working for me unfortunately, I'm using the latest release and I get "unplayable, video unavailable" error on everything.