Piped: piped.video Invidious: yewtu.be
Those would be good places to start, if you still want YouTube content without the YouTube front-end.
It might be a little surprising given what I literally just said, but I am not unreservedly in favor of just grabbing someone else’s content from someone else’s server and then playing it without the ads that pay for the hosting bills for the origin server.
I realize I’m probably in the minority in that, but I feel like a fully off-Youtube video hosting solution might be a better way.
I get what you’re saying, but the simple fact is that most of the content is on YouTube. An alternative would be better (and PeerTube might get there one day), but you’d be very limited in your choices if you avoided YT entirely. Also, I can’t personally feel too bad about “stealing” from YouTube.
In this case, the someone else is Alphabet megacorp. I wouldn’t waste any concern on them. The content is still hosted by YouTube, just played through the invidious instance.
To do away with all those concerns, you could self-host invidious, or donate to the instance you choose to use if self-hosting is outside of your technical prowess. If you want to support certain creators, donate to them directly instead.
It really gets to be a lot of edge cases to keep track of nowadays though, am I the only one? I mean the collection of scripts I have to keep track of to keep everything running as normal feels like the beginning of a new operating system.
I just bought a Nebula subscription. I can’t say they’re a replacement for YT, but they have good content.
I think that’s a very valid point, because that’s literally what Google does with AMP links…
being a yt-dlp user myself, who runs a media server for mostly YT content.
I can say that google deserves it. They store like 2-3x the amount of data that they need to be storing per video. 11 files for a single video 1080p to 4k. All different bitrates, some barely different than any others. (i realize it’s for codec support, but like, seriously?)
especially when they run predatory ads, force services into youtube premium that you don’t want, just generally do not respect the creator base and certainly not the viewer base. Honestly i think google deserves to lose money right now.
Google is the 4th richest company in the world… Besides they don’t deserve a dime from you, fuck them.
