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?

  • communism@lemmy.ml
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    12 days ago

    I found that switching my VPN server allowed FreeTube to work for me. I’m on Mullvad’s South African servers atm, which are quite slow. If anyone knows of any unblocked Mullvad servers that are faster, lmk, but those were the first ones I found that you can use FreeTube with.

  • Mwa@lemm.ee
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    12 days ago

    Tubular on on mobile and trying to find a Non Electron app for pc

  • Shape4985@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

    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.

  • 7_Heavens@lemmy.ml
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    12 days ago

    At this point we should just start torrenting YouTube. Like fuck YouTube.

      • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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        12 days ago

        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.

        • countrypunk@slrpnk.net
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          12 days ago

          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.

          • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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            12 days ago

            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 🙂

            • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
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              9 days ago

              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

            • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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              12 days ago

              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.

              • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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                12 days ago

                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.

                • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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                  11 days ago

                  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

      • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        I kinda assumed Vimeo would step up its social aspects when YouTube started ratcheting up its bullshit. Still waiting.

    • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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      11 days ago

      Well PeerTube is p2p like torrents are (but with a simple streaming web ui), so basically just run PeerTube

      • pineapple@lemmy.ml
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        11 days ago

        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.

        • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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          11 days ago

          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.

  • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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    12 days ago

    Searching Videos on FreeTube but watching these in the SMplayer, because FreeTube lists theVideos, but often don’t play it. SMplayer works almost always, Also possible open the Video copying the URL in it. Another possibility is searching the Video with Andisearch and watch it there in the search results sandboxed and anonym with the random proxies which use Andisearch.

    • corvus@lemmy.ml
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      12 days ago

      Use yt-dlp URL -o - | mpv - This way the video goes directly to mpv without using the disk, avoiding the need to delete. It should work with other viewers as well.

        • corvus@lemmy.ml
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          10 days ago

          Another thing that I do is make an alias: alias pvid=“yt-dlp $(xsel -b) -o - | mpv -”. Install xsel first, xsel -b pastes what’s in the clipboard. So you only have to copy the URL and execute pvid, no need to paste. Or even better make an app that executes that command and put it in the taskbar. You only have to click it after copying.

          • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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            10 days ago

            I wrote myself a Chrome add-on that adds a context menu entry to play or download links.

            background.js
            chrome.runtime.onInstalled.addListener(() => {
            		
                chrome.contextMenus.create({
                    id: "processLink",
                    title: "Download as...",
                    contexts: ["link"]
                });
            
                chrome.contextMenus.create({
                    id: "720p",
                    parentId: "processLink",
                    title: "720p",
                    contexts: ["link"]
                });
            
                chrome.contextMenus.create({
                    id: "music",
                    parentId: "processLink",
                    title: "MP3",
                    contexts: ["link"]
                });
            
                chrome.contextMenus.create({
                    id: "maxQual",
                    parentId: "processLink",
                    title: "Maximum quality video",
                    contexts: ["link"]
                });
            	
                chrome.contextMenus.create({
                    id: "separator1",
                    parentId: "processLink",
                    type: "separator",
                    contexts: ["link"]
                });
            
                chrome.contextMenus.create({
                    id: "piQual",
                    parentId: "processLink",
                    title: "30 fps for RPi",
                    contexts: ["link"]
                });
            	
                chrome.contextMenus.create({
                    id: "separator2",
                    parentId: "processLink",
                    type: "separator",
                    contexts: ["link"]
                });
            	
                chrome.contextMenus.create({
                    id: "streamLink",
                    parentId: "processLink",
                    title: "Stream to VLC...",
                    contexts: ["link"]
                });
            });
            
            chrome.contextMenus.onClicked.addListener((info, tab) => {
                let linkUrl = info.linkUrl;
            
                if (info.menuItemId === "720p") {
                    sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "video720");
                } else if (info.menuItemId === "music") {
                    sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "music");
                } else if (info.menuItemId === "maxQual") {
                    sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "videomp4");
                } else if (info.menuItemId === "piQual") {
                    sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "video720p30");
                } else if (info.menuItemId === "streamLink") {
                    sendLinkToNativeApp(linkUrl, "stream");
                }
            });
            
            function sendLinkToNativeApp(link, action) {
                console.log("Sending link to native app with action:", action, link);
                chrome.runtime.sendNativeMessage(
                    'com.example.ytlink_processor',
                    { link: link, action: action },
                    function(response) {
                        if (chrome.runtime.lastError) {
                            console.error("Error:", chrome.runtime.lastError.message);
                        } else {
                            console.log("Received response from native app:", response.output);
                        }
                    }
                );
            }
            
            native_host.py (chatGPT wrote this because I can't Python)
            import sys
            import subprocess
            import json
            import struct
            
            def log_to_file(message):
                with open("log.txt", "a") as log_file:
                    log_file.write(message + "\n")
            
            def get_message():
                raw_length = sys.stdin.read(4)
                if len(raw_length) == 0:
                    sys.exit(0)
                message_length = struct.unpack('I', raw_length)[0]
                message = sys.stdin.read(message_length)
                return json.loads(message)
            
            def send_message(message_content):
                message = json.dumps(message_content)
                sys.stdout.write(struct.pack('I', len(message)))
                sys.stdout.write(message)
                sys.stdout.flush()
            
            def process_link(link, action):
                if action == "stream":
                    cmd = 'yt-dlp --stream "{}" -o - | "D:/Programme/VLC/vlc.exe" -'.format(link)
                else:
                    cmd = 'yt-dlp --{} "{}"'.format(action, link)
                result = subprocess.Popen('start cmd /c "{}"'.format(cmd), shell=True)
                return result.stdout + result.stderr
            
            if __name__ == "__main__":
                message = get_message()
                link = message.get("link")
                action = message.get("action")
                if link and action:
                    output = process_link(link, action)
                    send_message({"output": output})
            
            

            The actions are just aliases for different qualities (old pi, so 720p60 stutters at times), audio extraction, etc.

  • airikr@lemmy.ml
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    12 days ago

    I download the videos I want to watch with yt-dlp. This applies to audio as well. I then add the videos to my Jellyfin server to watch them on the TV.

  • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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    11 days ago

    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”

    • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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      11 days ago

      I think thats the point of this question. How to get around that because YT has become unusable.

    • plm00@lemmy.ml
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      12 days ago

      I’ve had a good experience with GrayJay. It’s a bit young and missing features but it’s never broken for me.

      • land@lemmy.ml
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        12 days ago

        Btw, they also have a desktop app, but it’s currently in beta.

        FreeTube is more stable for desktop.

        • plm00@lemmy.ml
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          12 days ago

          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.

          • land@lemmy.ml
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            12 days ago

            I’ve used it for a few days, but it lacks several fundamental features. Additionally, it’s quite resource-intensive.

  • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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    12 days ago

    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 NewPipe

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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        9 days ago

        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