https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
Great news! The newest FreeTube update, which came out today, fixed the issues of videos not loading.
Oh hell yeah we’re gonna have a GOOD couple weeks of using Freetube before YouTube inevitably changes something else and breaks Freetube again.
FreeTube supports external players, if you use it as a tool to find videos instead of watching them, it works fairly reliably, such breakage of feed grabbing hasn’t happened in years. Then you just grab the videos with MPV via yt-dlp, not only MPV is a much better player than practically anything else, but yt-dlp contributors are much faster at figuring out problems and implementing fixes.
This latest problem wasn’t with playing videos on FT, it was with finding and fetching the feed/list of videos for your subscribed channels. IOW if you directly pasted in the url for a video it would play just fine, you just couldn’t fetch the list of available videos directly from FT.
Yea, thank you, that’s exactly what I meant with
breakage of feed grabbing
What would you say is the biggest difference between using an adblocker and using FreeTube?
It’s better to silo things that require you to install an extension on browsers into a different app. Extensions alter browser fingerprints. So this let’s you sponsorblock and AdBlock YouTube without worrying about fingerprints on all other sites
Also has a nice way to handle subscriptions without login
I mean, you really should be using an ad-blocker on the rest of the web too.
yes, but ideally via something built into the browser, not an extension
ublock is ubiquitous enough that it should be fine (comes pre-installed on Librewolf, Mullvad Browser, Ironfox, etc)
The issue with it is how it operates in userspace and how any settings alterations makes the print unique
doesn’t the entire browser run in userspace? Also settings alterations make any print unique, even built-in adblockers
Yep, this.
Adding to this, I want to follow channels and subscribe to creators, without making an account registered on youtube. I already have sponsor block and you block and a bunch of other enhancements for youtube, but it’s hard for me to curate the content that comes my way without having an account signed in.
So I just renamed FreeTube app to YouTube on my desktop machines, and slap the YouTube logo on it, and now it’s logically partitioned from everything else.
I actually do the same thing with a handful of other sites that I traffic frequently, instead of just making a profile for them or a sandboxed container for them. Facebook and Reddit both get summoned either from the start menu or from Mac OS spotlight and at least in theory those browsers that have been renamed and re-icon’d won’t be able to interact with any of my other browsers in any way.
Next step is to learn how to block those domains from my other browsers, and the block all of the domains from those specific rebadged browsers.
But for now, FreeTube is hands down the best game in town if I want to watch, say, the five most recent episodes from Hank Green or Level1 Techs, in a row.
