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Comment by Frotag | Hacker News Reader

IME newpipe breaks every few weeks or so, presumably because of some youtube change / obfuscation. Or at least that was the case a few years ago.

I've had more success hosting an invidious instance and using the materialious client for mobile. And a bonus is that it comes with sponsorblock built in.

https://invidious.io/

https://materialio.us/

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Not every week, more like a couple of times a year when YouTube makes some breaking changes.

Personally I take these periods as healthy time off from YouTube, so I'm no longer even annoyed by them.

I found pipepipe to be more stable, break less and have more features.

https://pipepipe.dev/

How can it be more stable if it still uses NewpipeExtractor?

Apparently they forked the extractor some years ago and have been maintaining it independently, without merging anything from the original branch.

Absolutely but I stop YouTube consumption if it's not through NewPipe, so a little productivity boost here and there is not too bad ;)

What’s the point of newpipe? You can block ads with ublock. You can block shorts with browser extensions. What other benefits does newpipe offer?

Newpipe is more pleasant than YouTube on FF Android with uBlock in my opinion. I often search find a video on YouTube, copy the share link into Newpipe and watch there.

What do you mean by pleasant? Is this primarily something for Android users?

Leaner. No ads in layout. Better organized. Not cluttered by buttons nobody asked for.

It's a native Android app vs. a bloated multi MB web page. Of course NewPipe and PipePipe are better. :)

If you have a $100 phone then UI is lighter as compared to running firefox etc.

Some things I've not seen others mention: you can subscribe to channels, create playlists etc, all without needing a Google account

I think it's only for mobile, and you can only get it by side-loading as far as I know.

"What other benefits does newpipe offer?"

The Javascript source code for Google's YouTube player and the YouTube website is obfuscated and/or minified

The Java or Kotlin source code for Newpipe is not

If one does not like something about Newpipe, one can change or remove it

Personally, I use it for a chronological feed of my subscriptions. It takes less time to find something worth watching, and it is easier to move on to do something else if there isn't anything worth watching.

Bookmarking or downloading interesting videos is also handy, since they aren't mixed in with my general bookmarks (in a web browser).

> I use it for a chronological feed of my subscriptions.

YouTube provides RSS feeds. You could use an RSS reader to subscribe to your channels. I do, it's marvellous.

On mobile I use PipePipe for listening to stuff (like presentation videos) in the background and downloading offline audio and video.

It can run in the background. I use it to listen to videos before I fall asleep. Ads would mess up this hard and keeping the screen on would be unnecessary use of energy and OLED.

That is the kind of habit I would want to break if I had it.

Falling asleep with a barely audible friendly human voice in the background instead of complete silence? Why would you prefer to avoid that?

Yes I would prefer having to be able to not rely on specific background noise. And it looks to me like most of sleep issues are the consequence of unhealthy habits (too mich screen time, too much blue light in the last hours of the day, too heavy dinners, or too close to bed time, not enough physical activities during the day, not enough sexual activities...) so I would rather treat the problem before the symptoms.

It also seems kind of potentially antisocial/annoying behavior if you share yoir bed with someone.

I don't have any problems with falling asleep without the voice. It's just pleasant. And I live alone. But I see why this might be habit forming for you and why you might want to avoid it. Overthinking something as simple and natural as falling asleep points to high neuroticism.

There's a mobile Firefox extension to do the same thing BTW.

Play in background, including with screen off, and ability to download videos to watch on a plane.

The UX is much better. It has convenient gestures to change brightness, volume and speed during tte video. The speed can range from 0.1× to 5×, not just 0.25× to 2×. You can download videos or play them in the background.

Newpipe doesn't clutter the screen with constant recommendations. You can just subscribe to the channels you want, get updates when they release a new video and that's it. It's a much more focused experience than regular Youtube.

Newpipe is a good youtube downloader for android. Works well for me with this pipeline: Youtube music -> newpipe -> music speed changer, so that I can slow down and pitch shift then song when using it to transcribe or learn a song.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this: NewPipe is an Android app, and consuming YouTube on a mobile browser is a much worse experience.

You can, in both Firefox and Brave

Thanks, I've edited my post to be more accurate.

Not needing a google account to view most of the videos? Being sble to download those you have interest to watch later offline (in a plane for instance)? Being able to subsribe to channels without a google account?

For me, the main benefit over the browser are the progress tracking and playlists. You can do both with bookmarks in the browser, but it's much less convenient.

I think that is overstating it, there has been one recent breakage and fix in the last few months or more roughly. It would be interesting to see it plotted out on a timeline though.

I think there was a phase of repeated breakages a while back, but things seem to have stabilised.

Fixes are released quickly ime too.

I use it to mainly download videos, and that seems to break every few weeks. I just updated and it's fixed. Small price to pay.

For downloads, I prefer Seal - a wrapper for yt-dlp. yt-dlp can update faster like this since doesn't have to update together with the app, and can add metadata and apply Sponsorblock. Could just use yt-dlp from Termux but this is more convenient.

A few years is different case. Invidious is also getting blocked easily. Are you running it now? If yes, then report.

I am running it, and I used to use NewPipe before. I honestly don't notice much difference in stability. In both cases I would experience issues every couple of months for a day or 2. As YouTube made some change and I need to upgrade the app or server to resolve it. I wouldn't say one is better than another. Both have different advantages and drawbacks that come mostly from the nature of one being an app and the other being a server+web

"IME newpipe breaks every few weeks or so, presumably because of some youtube change / obfuscation."

Same experience. I have a commandline program I wrote to retrieve YouTube download URLs many years ago. On average it has always been more reliable than Newpipe. It continues to work when Newpipe fails and I can fix it quickly when there is a YouTube change

However I noticed recently Newpipe, the original, not SponsorBlock, old version, no updates, had been going many weeks without failure. When it eventually failed I was able to get it working again immediately by simply changing the www.youtube.com IPv4 address

Will try this again when it fails the next time

Why did you think of changing the ip address?

Rate limiting IP addresses is one of the many tools in YouTube's anti 3rd party client toolbox.

got it, thanks.

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