In the lght of recent events (gloogel complaining about uBlock) I tried to investigate other available options out there. While Piped.video definitely works, it looks like it is only fluid for popular videos, and as soon as I want to watch something a little more obscure, it is basically impossible, I have infinite wheel spinning.
Have anyone here tried self hosting Piped/ Invidious, and could share a feedback about performance /usability ?
I’m selfhosting invidious for a few users (5), only downside is it have to be restarted every once in a while to clean up the db (cron every one hour did the trick pretty well). Very usable on every video :-)
I selfhosted Invidious a while back, but gave up on it when it stopped working and I couldn’t figure out why. I have no experience with Piped.
I settled on a third alternative, but I don’t want to point too much attention to it because I think it might be flying under Youtubes’ radar at the moment. But let me say this: if you embed a youtube video on a third party site and have it be part of a playlist with only the video in it, you won’t see any ads. so for example I’d be embedding a link like this: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/dQw4w9WgXcQ?playlist=dQw4w9WgXcQ&vq=hd1080&autoplay=1&modestbranding=1&rel=0 on my own page and can then watch it without ads :) if you have any questions, feel free to hit me up.
EDIT: Well, I just got the first ad using this method. So it seems youtube is cracking down on all ad avoidance methods and they found this one too. Only one ad so far, so it doesn’t seem to be as bad as their own site, with (sometimes multiple) ads before almost every video, but I’m sure it’ll happen. Guess Piped/Invidious it is!
Sounds like a loophole that would be pretty easy to cover from YT? Why would they be so generous and not showing ads in playlists
Wierd lol
yeah I know, makes no sense. I’ll use this workaround for as long as possible, but I’m sure I’ll have to move to Piped or Invidious sooner or later.
Playlists usually don’t have eyes watching so businesses don’t want to pay for their ads on playlists.
The thing is, I do see ads when I open the embedded video/playlist on youtube! I don’t think businesses would specifically avoid embedded playlists, but then happily advertise on playlists on youtube. It just looks like an oversight rather than a business decision to me.
Butbutbut radios don’t have eyes watching neither? Lol
Viewtube was pretty easy to get running. Their rocker container started up almost right away.
The only problem I have with them, is that it doesn’t seem to import my YouTube subscriptions.
How much minimum RAM requirements?
I’m not sure, I have an old machine with 16gb. It ran fine in that, but I found a better solution for myself shortly after.
There is an iOS extension that lets YouTube play in the native iOS browser. It blocks ads as well, so I just use that.
The privacy focused stuff is cool, but I’m blocking ads and my watch progress is saved which is important to me.
I use the Piped instance piped.adminforge.de and it works well enough. How popular a video is doesn’t make a difference but sometimes nothing will load for like half an hour or something. That’s fairly rare tho.
