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.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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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 had the same issue, but ~~mpc~~ mpv worked.
I wish MPC had a linux version. One of the few pieces of Windows-only software (along with foobar2000) that I actually miss.
A few months back I decided to fuck around and see if I could get it working in wine, and it seemed to work OK, but pretty jank. Too jank to consider seriously using.
Sorry I meant to say MPV, on linux here.
Oh word... I tried MPV briefly but didn't like it as much as vlc
No u don't miss anything lua plugin in vlc not updated already for long time so I am using yt-dlp workround and modified lua plugin
I used haruna and it works. The instructions on the FreeTube GitHub could be clearer though. Depending on if you're using FreeTube and or the external player as flatpak there are different ways to get it working.
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?
It works via my VPN. Maybe switch it to a different location?
Do you know of a working exit country/location? I've tried a few different locations with no dice, but if I know there is one that works for someone else, I'll certainly try that.
If you are from a Western country, use smaller, non-English speaking countries.
Thanks. It seems maybe Italy works for the moment anyway.
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.