Freetube is the best way to watch YouTube

I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.

And the best part is no ads whatsoever.

i constantly gotta swap invidious instances because youtube is being relentless in their war against invidious.

but the ui is awesome and I use it every day.

apparently freetube automatically uses a new invidious instance every time it starts up.

It seems to be at random, and many of the instances don’t work correctly. You’re better off finding one that does, and setting it as default.

Or host your own :) less likely to be blocked by Google if it’s just you using it.

Invidious is awesome, if possible, self hosting one in docker is great and keeps it up to date

How do I go about doing that (finding a good one and setting it up)? Its been a month that either the video loads or it doesn’t and when it does work it is extremely slow to the point I can’t watch on 1080p.

honestly I keep a tab open with the list of invidious instances open. because every day I usually have to change the instance. or swap it around.

invidious is fighting youtube very hard, but youtube is fighting back. so its difficult to keep up with.

i would keep an eye on the invidious instances list. and change to a different one if need be.

Thanks for the reply! Just went through the whole list and none of the instances worked for me. I always get: “[invidious ](SyntaxError: Unexpected end of JSON input)”. Googling the error led me to https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/issues/5506 ← There someone posted an unlisted API that works. It seems non official since it is not listed on https://api.invidious.io/ … is that safe to use? Thanks in advance

I just use native API and VPN

SmartTube beta on Android TV is fanfuckingtastic.

Ive been using it for years now and holy shit. Even if it doesnt blocked ads and even youtubers own ads, the app itself is FAR superior than anything what this vanilla youtube app is supposed to be.

Even if it doesnt blocked ads and even youtubers own ads

You mean even if it didn’t? Because it definitely DOES and you’re absolutely right about the rest

Yes thats what i mean. Even if it didnt then still the app is SUPERIOR IN EVERY WAY than vanilla youtube. But it does block everything. Its a godsend.

Even just having Sponsorblock built-in changed my life!!

Can it be used on a “normal” android phone or just android tv?

on Android phone you might wanna check out Tubular or LibreTube.

It’s a no for phones, set top (android) boxes only. My friend has had success running it on Windows 11 and casting to his TV.

Huh? I run SmartTube beta on my phone. I don’t recall having to do anything “magic” to get it working.

I love this app and would use it even if it didn’t block ads. The user experience is just so much better than the regular YouTube TV app. I’ve sent a few donations to the developer to thank them for their work.

Don’t forget Playlet for Roku!

Am I the only one that hates third-party clients for Desktop? They all have terrible UI and UX. Firefox + UBlock + Youtube is the way to go. For the phone it’s NewPipe or Grayjay.

Personally I still use the Firefox + uBlock + SponsorBlock + YouTube combo on my phone too. Maybe if I watched more YouTube on my phone it’d be worth figuring out an app with a better mobile UI, but I like that it’s a consistent experience anywhere I watch from.

Don’t forget about Enhancer for YouTube, SponsorBlock, and DeArrow! They’re all a must-have for desktop YT.

You forgot sponserblock, it’s amazing!

I used to think it is redundant too, but now see it as a quality-of-life difference. Because I can track my subscriptions and watch history, as well as have playlists. That is a massive improvement over folders of bookmarks.

I use Firefox with ublock on desktop, works like a charm. My favourite on android is YouTube revanced

Revanced is great for mobile

ReVanced isn’t a third-party client though. It’s patches applied to the official client.

I use the same combo on my phone without any issues or ads. Why use a client on the phone?

For me, Newpipe is faster. Plus I can track my subscriptions, playlists and watch history.

Revanced app had the superior UI/UX.

Not because if taste, but because it is the YouTube UI that then allows you to add and remove stuff from the UI, getting away from all the user-hostile stuff. If you want to.

Has. Autocorrect fail :)

If you use ublock origin and watch a lot, they’ll eventually put your ip address on a list where you have to log in to watch anything. Newpipe seems to be able to circumvent this but yt-dlp can’t. I haven’t tried freetube but maybe freetube can circumvent that.

Firefox + UBlock + Youtube is the way to go.

Unless you don’t like Google tracking everything you watch on youtube, that is.

Let’s be real, no matter how you’re watching YouTube, if you’re accessing the video directly and not cached through a third party server, Google is still tracking you.

I think the point is basically having free YouTube premium (no ads).

So, what do you not like about the Freetube’s UI and UX?

I prefer just about every third-party UI to the official one…

Keep it quiet with the Freetube articles, I don’t want it gone lol.

Created by deletor

Youtube/google/alphabet are almost certainly aware it exists already. The only real risk is too many people switching to it.

But even then there isn’t much they can do to stop it’s use. They can’t tighten up or remove their api, but then page scraping will take over. They can obfuscation their page, but that will not work forever.

It’s a cat and mouse game that is impossible to win for them.

You know the same thing was said with Beeper’s imessage on Android pytorch success. “Apple won’t be able to change this. They’d have to change the very nature of imessage itself to block this!” And then, two days later it was blocked completely so, as much as I would hope Google couldn’t block FreeTube, don’t expect such huge successes without tempering expectation.

I can’t say I’m familiar with that particular event. But I’m guessing there is a difference there in that iMessage is well, a messaging service. YouTube isn’t, their videos are on public webpages.

All Freetube and company needs to do, if it comes to it, is find a way extract a video from a public webpage. There’s a million ways to do that.

iMessage is not a public webpage, and so there is no real way around it unless you go through their api.

Deletor by created

The best part about FreeTube unlike other Third-Party clients is that it retains a better YouTube-like suggestions system for any videos you wanna watch next. Discoverability is still a very important thing for me

How does it do it better that yt?

That’s not what they said. They said it’s better than other 3rd party clients because it’s just like YouTube’s suggestions.

I see what I got wrong here, thanks

And you can have multiple favorites lists.

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Freetube is the best way to watch YouTube(www.popsci.com)

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