LibreTube has a feature that no other piped/invidious client has, which is to have one auth instance and one view instance.
Sometimes videos are not viewable on a specific instance, but this way you can keep all your subscriptions and other settings even when switching to a different instance.
I use sponsorblock on desktop, and sometimes I find the parts that they skip annoying. I don't fully agree with where and when they skip things. Watching Hot Ones today, they had a segment about how they have Hot Ones Hot Pockets now. and it skipped over it. But also, the hot pockets were a big part of the episode. For LTT videos, they skip the entire segue, instead of leaving the segue and then skipping the sponsor. The segues are a meme. They aren't sponsorship. Another channel I watch tests microphones and uses ad read to demo demo different mic quality. At that point skipping the ad read is skipping the actual content of the video. There's a few channels that mix the ad read into the context of what they are doing, and skipping those sections skips over important context for the rest of the video, and then i have to rewind into the sponsor part to see what is going on.
I actually agree with newpipe to some degree. There is very bad sponsorship, and there is light mentions of sponsorship or sponsorship adjacent content. not everything is black or white. Sponsorblock makes it all or nothing (they have different categories but I often disagree with what they put into the categories).
I wish I could turn it on per channel. because some channels I hate the 2 minute long brilliant ads, but on other channels Im fine with a 5 second "we're building this thing using X company parts because X company is sponsoring the video"
I still use it, but i find it just as frustrating as it is helpful sometimes.
Honestly, I do not understand why one should use this. I have recently seen some high quality YT videos, each of a length of 30-60 minutes. In those videos where some sponsors mentioned which took only one or two minutes. Seems perfectly OK for me to support the creators. I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
If you watch YouTube enough you'll basically become aware of all the sponsors pretty quickly (and may even be a customer of some already!), so any exposure beyond that is a waste of time for all involved - if I didn't buy the product after seeing it 10 times, I won't buy it after seeing it the 11th either.
Really? They will die? Are you suggesting that long form video didn’t exist before YouTube sponsors?
Innovation requires disruption, which requires competition, which YouTube has none of. If you want long form video content to survive in the medium to long term it needs to be possible to make a living in a diversity of ways and not be dependent on just one provider. So in that sense supporting the existing system only serves to reinforce the failure of long form content, as eventually a system without substantial competition will move to reduce cost and eventually focus only on the more profitable short form content (which is what’s happening).
The current war between YouTube and its users wouldn’t be possible if there were any viable alternatives at all.
I would think if you really cared about long form creators you’d support platforms that paid properly and didn’t keep 45% of their revenues. Even Apple only keeps 30% and they get deeply criticized, but whenever YouTube comes up people come out defend them. And all of this happens before subscription revenue, and it doesn’t include any of the other revenue Google takes off the top like landing page ads, sponsored promotion, etc.
Long form is in danger because of YouTube’s shift towards short form video. We should be pushing for competitors and not allowing them this insanely dominant position to an entire Internet content type.
Despite the name, it actually blocks a lot more than just sponsors. It can be set to automatically skip intros, outros, recaps, like and subscribe reminders, non-music sections of music videos, and other "fluff".
It significantly boosts the signal to noise ratio, and makes YouTube a much better experience.
So what are we paying premium for if the creator pushes their own ads? Anyhow, when I was watching TV year's ago, I hardly ever stayed on a channel during the ads break. I won't sacrifice my time being sold on mostly rubbish which I wouldn't buy anyway (vpn, brilliant etc.)
>I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Then so be it. I miss when people uploaded videos for the sake of it, not to make money by way of exploiting the users' cognitive vulnerabilities. I remember the days when I could search for a video on how to replace my dirt bike's carburetor and it was less than two minutes, didn't include any ads, and was straight to the point, all first person POV; you wouldn't even see the guy's face. Nobody was trying to get rich off it. It was all about sharing it with other people.
> In those videos where some sponsors mentioned which took only one or two minutes. Seems perfectly OK for me to support the creators.
There is no good reason to force ads on anyone. I dont care if the creator needs to make a living out of youtube. Thats their problem and they should use stuff like patreon instead.
I don't care to sit through sponsor reads, nothing more to it than that. When I'm viewing on a client that doesn't support sponsorblock, I'll manually seek to the end of the segment. Supporting the creator is great; I pay for YouTube Premium, though thanks to uBlock Origin I wouldn't see the add if even if I stopped paying. To a couple creators, I send a regular donation. If I could spend another $10/mo to make up for any revenue my sponsorblock usage loses other creators, I'd do that, but I'm less enthusiastic about regularly listening to sales pitches for the same products over and over again.
Also: I'm not sure how common it is for YouTube sponsorship contracts to have payment contingent on the view count for the section of the video with the sponsored segment, and I'm not sure if the way sponsorblock skips such segments is visible to YouTube's analytics. With at least some of the most prolific sponsors of creators I watch (Audible, Brilliant, etc) the payout is based on how many viewers sign up for a trial through the affiliate link. And YouTube has no incentive to make it easy for creators to share their detailed analytics with third-party sponsors, since independent sponsorships cut YouTube out of the deal. YouTube would prefer creators replace their independent sponsor reads with mid-roll ads.
Sponsorblock can also skip theme songs, recaps, and other parts of content you may not want. I also enjoy being able to show my children certain content from regular YouTube without having them subjected to the ads or me scrolling around.
I have it configured to not skip ads on a few creators who:
1- Makes good, useful content that I watch often.
2- Doesn't abuse sponsorship sections. Sponsor segment at the beginning of a video? Auto-skip. Half the video is about the sponsor? Auto-skip. Constantly gets sponsorship from spam/fraudy/irrelevant companies? Auto-skip.
For all the channels that doesn't fall into these categories: tough luck.
Besides skipping sponsor segments, it has many other useful features such as marking/skipping intros and outros, filler/jokes, and marking the timestamp of the video highlight which is useful if you want to skip 20 minutes of filler and jump to the part the thumbnail promises.
1. The computer doesn't know whether you skipped the ad, and won't feel bad when you do.
2. The computer does track whether you watch the ad segment, and that information makes it back to the advertiser. Personally, I wouldn't want to support "creators" spying on me in this way.
In either case, the creator has no costs for you watching, and youtube has lower costs if you skip the sponsored segment. If you choose not to watch the video in the first place, it can only hurt their sponsorship.
In most cases sponsored content has the same problem as traditional ads but because it is coming directly from someone people see as more reliable viewers might fall for it quicker. With the added disadvantage of those ads having no real regulation and opaque quality checks, if any by the creator.
One example that comes to mind is how a lot of financial creators pushed crypto products.
I really don't care about sponsor block (I mean I don't mind these parts of the videos), but adblock on YouTube is absolutely essential. And these apps usually when they have adblocl this includes sponsor block.
I've been using this for years to download YouTube videos when I go on trips, it makes it super easy since you can just share the link directly from YouTube to NewPipe and it'll pop up a neat download UI to select quality and threads to use.
Really great app for that purpose, although I will say I just used ReVanced for general YouTube browsing on my phone.
I believe the one thing i see lacking for newpipe is viewing livestreams. Revanced is the way to go for a good youtube experience, but i use newpipe for downloading and saving a video offline.
I've watched livestreams in newpipe. A few hours after it ended I used new pipe again to download the whole thing to see the parts I missed (new pipe wouldn't let me rewind to the start of the livestream after I joined)
I've been using this on android for more than 6 years. Love being able to quickly download a local copy of video or music as I'm boarding a flight or train. Highly recommend getting it using fdroid instead of apk because there have been points when youtube made changes that break the app and you'll need to get the latest update
I would recommend using Obtainium[1] over F-Droid.
Obtainum downloads APKs directly from the repository's releases page, for example the GitHub releases page.
Why not use F-Droid?
"Due to their process of building apps, apps in the official F-Droid repository often fall behind on updates. F-Droid maintainers also reuse package IDs while signing apps with their own keys, which is not ideal as it gives the F-Droid team ultimate trust. Additionally, the requirements for an app to be included in the official F-Droid repo are less strict than other app stores like Google Play, meaning that F-Droid tends to host a lot more apps which are older, unmaintained, or otherwise no longer meet modern security standards."[2]
Do keep in mind the prior part that explains why they reuse package IDs and use signing keys that way; F-Droid aims for reproducible builds[0]. They also to my knowledge do respect developers that want a different build ID/package title to be used compared to the "official" version. The F-Droid version of Island for example is called Insular specifically to avoid this issue.
PrivacyGuides' motivations here are really aimed for a specific type of user (and I'll note that it's slightly odd for them to place so much faith in a point of origin that's historically been the easiest to compromise: the upstream developer usually is the easiest target, particularly on otherwise dormant software); the tradeoff F-Droid does might be more worthwhile for most people in that they act more like a linux distro maintainer, so there's a second set of eyes to prevent any shenanigans from being afoot on the upstream.
You can as I understand it run their actual servers rather easily (provided you have the computer space to do so)[1], so solving that is pretty easy, should you feel inclined to do so.
Highly recommend the NewPipe upstream repository within F-Droid, they usually fix breakage right away whereas F-Droid repository version can be a few days behind.
I can't find a source which has all the financial figures for YouTube, but YouTube had a gross revenue of 29 bn USD in 2022. Alphabet had 55 bn USD in net income in 2022 of which how much was YouTube's share in the net income is unknown (or at least I couldn't find it).
Let's use some assumptions to get to a number.
1. Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.
2. We know that YouTube's share in the overall revenue of Alphabet was 10.5%. Let's assume that all of Alphabet's properties were proportionately profitable (highly incorrect assumption). If the properties were proportionately profitable, YouTube's would have bought in a net income of 5.75 bn.
3. In the past it has been reported that YouTube has been breakeven from a profitability perspective.
This means that YouTube's net profit is in the range of 0 to 5bn USD. This is at best a gross profit margin of 17% which is not good for an internet services company.
I strongly believe technology like NewPipe should exist and companies shouldn't push for more DRM. But end users should not misuse open technologies so much so that companies end up with no other option but E2E encryption for video.
I wonder if a torrent style equivalent for bandwidth sharing for things like YouTube content creators could work. Like you get ads unless you seed enough and then no ads when you consume.
I think it'd only work as a near seamless ui experience and not actually using torrents or any extra setup or complications. Probably branded a bit differently.
The problem with p2p for video is that the storage and bandwidth requirements are enormous most platform consumers are using mobile devices with limited storage and bandwidth which would have difficulty contributing to the network.
Maybe some type of appliance one could run out of their home to buy in or something? But a lot of home users have terrible upload or no internet at all.
Peertube is great but could never keep up with the sheer volume of data uploaded to YouTube.
Bandwidth costs money, YouTube can probably do it cheaper than end users at scale. But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.
> Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.
That’s a very poor and totally off assumption to start with, and makes it seem like YouTube is extremely generous. I’d guess YouTube shares, at best, 20% of the ad revenue with the content creator.
Absolutely, though the default F-Droid repo is a little slow to update (in case of the twice-a-year "Youtube changed their UI, breaking the world" update), so Newpipe team recommends their own (third party) F-Droid repo[1], where the updates are fresh off the press.
You should use peertube instead. Saddly there isn't much content there, but try to look there first and reward those who post there with your eyeballs.
> Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaSS will be solved by developing free software for servers. For the server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their developers/owners have power over the server. That's unfair to the server operator, and doesn't help the server's users at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect the server's users from the effects of SaaSS. These programs liberate the server operator, but not the server's users.
Newpipe is great for background listening and PIP (window can be resized/moved). For downloading, Seal reigns supreme. You can 'share' a video to the app and it downloads the video right away.
I'm watching fine on Firefox with uBlock Origin. I mean, I don't get ads. What else am I missing by not using NewPipe (I don't care about downloading videos).
Subscribing to channels. Trim silences. Various pitch and speed options. Background play. Picture in picture. Watch history. Playlists. NewPipe also plays Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and has the entire media.ccc.de library and can do all those things with those services as well.
Readit News
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
https://libretube.dev/
Sometimes videos are not viewable on a specific instance, but this way you can keep all your subscriptions and other settings even when switching to a different instance.
https://codeberg.org/NullPointerException/PipePipe
https://freetubeapp.io/
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But I moved to libretube now. Newpipe kept throwing up errors when I jumped around a video.
I actually agree with newpipe to some degree. There is very bad sponsorship, and there is light mentions of sponsorship or sponsorship adjacent content. not everything is black or white. Sponsorblock makes it all or nothing (they have different categories but I often disagree with what they put into the categories).
I wish I could turn it on per channel. because some channels I hate the 2 minute long brilliant ads, but on other channels Im fine with a 5 second "we're building this thing using X company parts because X company is sponsoring the video"
I still use it, but i find it just as frustrating as it is helpful sometimes.
What do they mean? They dont even want to provide it as an option?
Innovation requires disruption, which requires competition, which YouTube has none of. If you want long form video content to survive in the medium to long term it needs to be possible to make a living in a diversity of ways and not be dependent on just one provider. So in that sense supporting the existing system only serves to reinforce the failure of long form content, as eventually a system without substantial competition will move to reduce cost and eventually focus only on the more profitable short form content (which is what’s happening).
The current war between YouTube and its users wouldn’t be possible if there were any viable alternatives at all.
I would think if you really cared about long form creators you’d support platforms that paid properly and didn’t keep 45% of their revenues. Even Apple only keeps 30% and they get deeply criticized, but whenever YouTube comes up people come out defend them. And all of this happens before subscription revenue, and it doesn’t include any of the other revenue Google takes off the top like landing page ads, sponsored promotion, etc.
Long form is in danger because of YouTube’s shift towards short form video. We should be pushing for competitors and not allowing them this insanely dominant position to an entire Internet content type.
It significantly boosts the signal to noise ratio, and makes YouTube a much better experience.
Because we don't want to be advertised to. There is no need for any further justification.
> I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Let them die.
Then so be it. I miss when people uploaded videos for the sake of it, not to make money by way of exploiting the users' cognitive vulnerabilities. I remember the days when I could search for a video on how to replace my dirt bike's carburetor and it was less than two minutes, didn't include any ads, and was straight to the point, all first person POV; you wouldn't even see the guy's face. Nobody was trying to get rich off it. It was all about sharing it with other people.
Also, if you are fine with sponsor spots, you probably would have to also be okay with watching ads, so no adblocking either then.
There is no good reason to force ads on anyone. I dont care if the creator needs to make a living out of youtube. Thats their problem and they should use stuff like patreon instead.
I don't care to sit through sponsor reads, nothing more to it than that. When I'm viewing on a client that doesn't support sponsorblock, I'll manually seek to the end of the segment. Supporting the creator is great; I pay for YouTube Premium, though thanks to uBlock Origin I wouldn't see the add if even if I stopped paying. To a couple creators, I send a regular donation. If I could spend another $10/mo to make up for any revenue my sponsorblock usage loses other creators, I'd do that, but I'm less enthusiastic about regularly listening to sales pitches for the same products over and over again.
Also: I'm not sure how common it is for YouTube sponsorship contracts to have payment contingent on the view count for the section of the video with the sponsored segment, and I'm not sure if the way sponsorblock skips such segments is visible to YouTube's analytics. With at least some of the most prolific sponsors of creators I watch (Audible, Brilliant, etc) the payout is based on how many viewers sign up for a trial through the affiliate link. And YouTube has no incentive to make it easy for creators to share their detailed analytics with third-party sponsors, since independent sponsorships cut YouTube out of the deal. YouTube would prefer creators replace their independent sponsor reads with mid-roll ads.
1- Makes good, useful content that I watch often. 2- Doesn't abuse sponsorship sections. Sponsor segment at the beginning of a video? Auto-skip. Half the video is about the sponsor? Auto-skip. Constantly gets sponsorship from spam/fraudy/irrelevant companies? Auto-skip.
For all the channels that doesn't fall into these categories: tough luck.
1. The computer doesn't know whether you skipped the ad, and won't feel bad when you do.
2. The computer does track whether you watch the ad segment, and that information makes it back to the advertiser. Personally, I wouldn't want to support "creators" spying on me in this way.
In either case, the creator has no costs for you watching, and youtube has lower costs if you skip the sponsored segment. If you choose not to watch the video in the first place, it can only hurt their sponsorship.
If they use ads they will block.
If they ask for payment they will pirate.
Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with
I think it's one of those things like shoes... Nobody thinks they need shoes till they try them, and then they tend to wear them all the time.
One example that comes to mind is how a lot of financial creators pushed crypto products.
Really great app for that purpose, although I will say I just used ReVanced for general YouTube browsing on my phone.
This is a live stream I just watched to check that it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYDqZQpim8
It's a water pool in the Namib desert, so safe for work
Obtainum downloads APKs directly from the repository's releases page, for example the GitHub releases page.
Why not use F-Droid? "Due to their process of building apps, apps in the official F-Droid repository often fall behind on updates. F-Droid maintainers also reuse package IDs while signing apps with their own keys, which is not ideal as it gives the F-Droid team ultimate trust. Additionally, the requirements for an app to be included in the official F-Droid repo are less strict than other app stores like Google Play, meaning that F-Droid tends to host a lot more apps which are older, unmaintained, or otherwise no longer meet modern security standards."[2]
[1]: https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium#readme [2]: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/#f-droid
PrivacyGuides' motivations here are really aimed for a specific type of user (and I'll note that it's slightly odd for them to place so much faith in a point of origin that's historically been the easiest to compromise: the upstream developer usually is the easiest target, particularly on otherwise dormant software); the tradeoff F-Droid does might be more worthwhile for most people in that they act more like a linux distro maintainer, so there's a second set of eyes to prevent any shenanigans from being afoot on the upstream.
You can as I understand it run their actual servers rather easily (provided you have the computer space to do so)[1], so solving that is pretty easy, should you feel inclined to do so.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
[1]: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata contains all the files used to generate their servers, should just be able to combine it with their guide on how to run a buildserver on https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Build_Server_Setup/
Let's use some assumptions to get to a number.
1. Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.
2. We know that YouTube's share in the overall revenue of Alphabet was 10.5%. Let's assume that all of Alphabet's properties were proportionately profitable (highly incorrect assumption). If the properties were proportionately profitable, YouTube's would have bought in a net income of 5.75 bn.
3. In the past it has been reported that YouTube has been breakeven from a profitability perspective.
This means that YouTube's net profit is in the range of 0 to 5bn USD. This is at best a gross profit margin of 17% which is not good for an internet services company.
I strongly believe technology like NewPipe should exist and companies shouldn't push for more DRM. But end users should not misuse open technologies so much so that companies end up with no other option but E2E encryption for video.
I think it'd only work as a near seamless ui experience and not actually using torrents or any extra setup or complications. Probably branded a bit differently.
Maybe some type of appliance one could run out of their home to buy in or something? But a lot of home users have terrible upload or no internet at all.
Peertube is great but could never keep up with the sheer volume of data uploaded to YouTube.
https://joinpeertube.org
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
That’s a very poor and totally off assumption to start with, and makes it seem like YouTube is extremely generous. I’d guess YouTube shares, at best, 20% of the ad revenue with the content creator.
https://www.yrcharisma.com/the-youtube-revenue-split-who-kee...
Deleted Comment
[1]: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/
See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
> Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaSS will be solved by developing free software for servers. For the server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their developers/owners have power over the server. That's unfair to the server operator, and doesn't help the server's users at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect the server's users from the effects of SaaSS. These programs liberate the server operator, but not the server's users.
Deleted Comment
https://grayjay.app/
https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay
Link: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junkfood.seal/
> You can also subscribe to channels from it without a YouTube account.
This means that losing your Google account does not mean losing your playlist.
Big tech accounts can be surprisingly fragile.
One of my most used F-Droid apps.