this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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If you're on desktop, download FreeTube. No more ads, ever. No more jittery youtube videos even though you have 300mbs down, you can download any video in app at max speeds, and its not algorithm fed. I imported my subscriptions, and now if I want to see something new I can use the not broken search function. Its like early early youtube and its wonderful!
Freetube is great but it's also a source of endless frustration. Like if you walk away from your computer the stream times out and it won't resume. Then it says "reload" and they never implemented a reload button so you have to navigate to something else. Except their navigation doesn't work quite right so sometimes if you click too fast it stays on the new page after you try to go back to the one you wanted to reload. Rawr. (GitHub issues 1005, 1425, 1500, 1958, 4062, 4409, 5019, 5152, 6136, 6201)
I use youtube-local which is great, but it's more susceptible to breakage which is why I'm currently back on freetube and very very very frustrated.
In Freetube, reload is ctrl-R on Linux and Windows, and cmd-R on Mac. I have experienced the fact that if you leave a video paused for a long time (hours) then you need to refresh. If you have history active, after refreshing the video will resume from where you left, which by the way is better then actual YouTube where it will often resume from an earlier timestamp. I have not experienced the other issues you mentioned.
Yeah I learned that when I looked up the issue number, very disappointed that it's Ctrl+R instead of the canonical reload button for the last 30 years (F5). :(
Since you knew Ctrl+r you wouldn't experience those issues. That's a side effect of "reload" without a reload button.
Control r is standard reload for web browsers and other stuff too
But since F5 is and has been for 30 years the universal refresh button I never needed to learn that some software uses a different, undiscoverable key combination.
There's no reload button directly in the UI, but if you press alt and then go to View > Reload or View > Force Reload. It's not ideal, but it does work.
Edit: Didn't finish reading your comment, I've never experienced any of those issues, especially with navigation.
With the recent major update, Freetube implemented a new player which I like much better than the old one. With the new player, all keyboard shortcuts work well, that's great for me because my Home Theatre PC is controlled by a wireless keyboard+touchpad.
I still use yt-dlp to download because I don't understand Freetube's options. It's either only audio or video
Also if you're on Linux and you get a white screen during playback (has been an issue since 0.22) this fix works for me:
freetube --enable-features=''edit: posting a vertical pic messes up the webpage a bit. If it's annoying tell me
That's a side effect of YouTube messing with the streams to try to break downloaders. Obvs a dedicated downloader like ytdlp handles YouTube jerking the chain around better than a tool intended for viewing.
My understanding is you're pretty much only gonna get those broken up streams especially for piratey content like music videos and tv shows. Ytdlp will join with ffmpeg.
Seconded. Tis a beautiful experience. And if you are currently using FreeTube, please throw a donation their way. They are putting a lot of work in to this app.
Thank you so much. Youtube hasn't been playing videos past the 1:00 mark and idk why.
It’s a bit of a faff, but I use FreeTube to grab the URLs which I then drop into a yt-dlp command that I use to download my subscriptions to watch on Plex on my Apple TV. Works a treat, though I wish I could get Plex to display them properly.
Why not just use tubesync? There's another one like youtube archivist or something as well. If you already have a Plex server you probably have the skills to set it up.
https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
Here's the other that I'm aware of https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
I found tubesync kinda needs to be run on vpn if you don't want YouTube to ban you during the initial sync, I assume the same is true for archivist. Works fine after that first sync tho (I'm actually using as an archive since people tend to take their stuff down once they change hobbies for some reason, so I literally was archiving whole channels).
Yeah, I’m aware of both of them but have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out how to get them to work. I’m fairly new to Linux, and the instructions for both seem to assume a certain amount of expertise.
Oh, and as I type this I’ve remembered that I did manage to get one of them to work, but something to do with the way it downloads the videos means that you need to install a Plex plugin of some description because Plex won’t recognise the metadata or some shit.
So for the time being I’m happy enough to fanny about with my manual method. Between my wife and I it takes up about ten minutes every couple of days, and that’s ok.
Yeah if small quantity it's not too bad to do your way. I use jellyfin so everything shows up ok for me, although it's weird to see the "wrong" thumbnails.
For me I've got everything as a docker setup using https://docs.linuxserver.io/ They don't have a tubesync one but I found they have good instructions for setting it up and that's how I learned enough to do so on my own with tubesync. But there is def a curve there.
My perfect ideal would be freetube as a web server just for browsing where I could hit the dl button and fire off a download command to my server, then it shows up in jellyfin or Plex. I... Haven't found a way to do this seamlessly yet, but I'm always on the lookout