Hail NewPipe! “Background” playback is just awesome and only downloads the audio stream. Use it all the time for listening to lectures and presentations as podcasts.
I tried to do the same with music but for some reason the next enqueued song has the tendency of going straight up to 20 min, 60 min, 3 hour, 10 hour long videos.
Not sure why. But this was reliably repeatable. Starting from any given song, I'd hit Next and before 5 to 10 videos I'd already be in the 10hrs long spectrum.
Another thing that would also happen too frequently is that the next suggested video gets locked on always different videos of the same song. Once and again.
Without any way to limit video duration and some filter to skip videos with a too similar name to the ones already played, it was useless to me.
We could argue that that's just the next video suggested by YouTube's server. But YouTube ReVanced, on the other hand, doesn't exhibit any of those issues and starting from any song, will enqueue a variety of mostly non-repeated, single-song videos. Much better.
YouTube premium does that too, it did even when it was called YouTube red. As well as hacked versions of the YouTube app that always enable premium features.
What is nice with NewPipe is that it is independent from the YouTube app.
i use https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe which is super amazing. sadly the PR to implement sponsorblock in the main newpipe was worked on for almost a year but unfortunately the youtube-dl fiasco happened around the same time and that spooked the devs who refused to import the PR.
That forced the PR author to set up the fork which is working surprisingly well. People were imagining that the fork would not survive but i have been using it since day 1 and can't imagine newpipe or libretube without sponsorblock.
+1 for sponsor block fork. Its available through Izzydroid repo [1] that can be added to F-droid. The author should release it soon as well. Its amazing how well it works
Just curious, because my intuition is that anyone who finds sponsorblock to be crucial is likely consuming a decent bid of media... What are your strategies for compensating the creators you enjoy?
Very esoteric app, however I think Ymusic needs to be mentioned whenever YT alternatives are brought up. It streams only the MP3 of the video and the UI is cleaner imo - so it's easier to use if you intend to only listen to "podcasts" or music as an alternative to Spotify.
This is just begging the question: surely you don't watch videos while driving? And if you just want the audio, there are music-focused YT apps (ViMusic, or like sibling said, YMusic)
I remember there being talks of a complete rewrite of Newpipe. Did anything come of that? I'm a happy user, so I don't really have an opinion on whether it should happen or not.
Schabi here:
The team wants to start the rewrite in 2024 after 0.26.0 got released. The reson for the rewrite: Codebase got hard to maintin so we need to refactor. Also android changed the UI style and the UI frameworks a lot. We want to stay up to date with that.
Newpipe has always unreliable and prone to not working for me, unfortunately. Crashes. Youtube import gives just 4 subscriptions while I have hundreds and so on.
Can you elaborate ont he crashes more? when i still had an android phone newpipe was the only app i actively enjoyed using because it was just reliable and simple. the only issues i ever had were the same everyone had when youtube broke the functionality and usually there was a dev build ready in a few hours with a patch and then a proper update pretty shortly after on the main app. but i never used it to sign in to youtube so might be a difference. i specifically chose newpipe because i didn’t need to deal with google’s nonsense when using it
after using piped and newpipe for 1.5+ years, it is not good enough to fully replace youtube app for me. although i believe it has been mostly on the server side and not as much on the client (besides random crashes that were happening when opening a "new" type of video in recent past). currently, most new videos of my subscriptions (manually added) do not show up on time. they often pop up in retrospect, maybe after another person has watched that video on the piped instance.
on ios yattee allows use of both invidious and piped instances and the difference in reliability is night and day between the two. i truly hope the project makes further strides in and achieve a stable experience.
I used Newpipe first after degoogling, then switch to Libretube for the supposed privacy benefits. App looked a bit better too and crashed often, but way too often there were problems with connecting the Piped instances it was using for streaming and it was laggy and slowly. Newpipe, conversely, when it works, is fast. Sometimes it crashes repeatedly but the problems are usually resolved quickly. Streaming is good quality and fast.
Did you send crash reports, report the problem with the missing subscriptions, maybe even have a go at finding the cause if you happen to be versed in the technology? I've never seen it crash [1] on any of my devices so I can add that piece of anecdata to yours. I'm not a heavy Newpipe user since I run my own Invidious instance which offers close to the same functionality (minus playing in the background since that needs to be implemented on the device while Invidious is a web service) but for those times I do use Newpipe it works well. On those odd instances it doesn't load the video the solution tends to be an upgrade away.
[1] as in 'the app crashes', not 'the video does not play', the former is a crash while the latter is an incompatibility with Youtube and tends to be solved by upgrading Newpipe.
I really hope "Fix app not responding, background app crashes and issues with starting the player" actually addresses the issue. Getting an ANR popup and having to either dismiss it every 15 seconds or kill the app, search again for your video, and hope it doesn't happen again is a horrible experience.
The only other experience-breaking issue I ran into is lack of support for multiple language tracks, which also seems fixed :)
I've switched to it maybe two months ago and use it in foreground and background mode, tried pip mode once or twice. But I'm using it almost every day. I had maybe four or five crashes so far, nothing that comes even close to the annoyance of YouTube's ad rate nowadays.
I've recently started using [Grayjay](https://grayjay.app/). It's not open source, but it is source available and individuals are allowed to modify the code to their liking. I've found that it crashes more often than NewPipe, but the vastly expanded features, more frequent updates, and improved performance fetching subscriptions are all worth it imo.
I use NewPipe regularly but unfortunately many videos play.. .weird, either skipping frames or pausing for a few milliseconds and then going faster. I have a Pixel 6a so it's as stock Android as you can get without using an AOSP based ROM...
OTOH on the desktop Freetube is basically 10 times better than original Youtube under every aspect, and videos play perfectly. Kudos to Freetube.
Only use NewPipe for SoundCloud. Quite stable for that. For YouTube it's a waste of time, IMHO. Constantly breaking, IME. Command line utilties for interacting with YouTube I wrote for myself are much more stable and almost never break. (Maybe once every few years. And fixed the same day by me.)
100% of my youtube use on mobile is via newpipe and I love it. On the desktop it's all command line, but I can't agree that newpipe is a waste of time.
One of the features new pipe offers that I only started using is the ability to "subscribe" to channels. I never log into youtube, so subscriptions are client side only. They're basically just a list of bookmarks, but newpipe can also go out and pull down a listing of new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to and i can categorize those channels into groups. It's extremely useful!
Newpipe does occasionally stop working, but it's been many months since it last happened. When it does happen, it's never newpipe's fault. Blame google (who sometimes intentionally tries to break things), but when that happens the command line usually still works and updates are pretty fast.
My only complaint really is that sometimes new pipe will clear a long list of queued downloads. I'm not sure what triggers it, but it can be difficult to go back and track down what was queued up. For all I know, that's been fixed in this new update
[+] [-] mikae1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j1elo|2 years ago|reply
Not sure why. But this was reliably repeatable. Starting from any given song, I'd hit Next and before 5 to 10 videos I'd already be in the 10hrs long spectrum.
Another thing that would also happen too frequently is that the next suggested video gets locked on always different videos of the same song. Once and again.
Without any way to limit video duration and some filter to skip videos with a too similar name to the ones already played, it was useless to me.
We could argue that that's just the next video suggested by YouTube's server. But YouTube ReVanced, on the other hand, doesn't exhibit any of those issues and starting from any song, will enqueue a variety of mostly non-repeated, single-song videos. Much better.
[+] [-] GuB-42|2 years ago|reply
What is nice with NewPipe is that it is independent from the YouTube app.
[+] [-] unixhero|2 years ago|reply
Android rules
[+] [-] poulpy123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erratic6576|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2Gkashmiri|2 years ago|reply
That forced the PR author to set up the fork which is working surprisingly well. People were imagining that the fork would not survive but i have been using it since day 1 and can't imagine newpipe or libretube without sponsorblock.
[+] [-] wanderingmind|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshad...
[+] [-] theNewMicrosoft|2 years ago|reply
https://github.com/bravenewpipe/NewPipe
[+] [-] soulofmischief|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrNosferatu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EspadaV9|2 years ago|reply
Edit: as soon as I posted that I read more than the first line of the readme and saw this link to the NewPipe blog - https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertisi...
[+] [-] dre85|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvrg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ForkMeOnTinder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noman-land|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trulyrandom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-scrabi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kzrdude|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csydas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rldjbpin|2 years ago|reply
after using piped and newpipe for 1.5+ years, it is not good enough to fully replace youtube app for me. although i believe it has been mostly on the server side and not as much on the client (besides random crashes that were happening when opening a "new" type of video in recent past). currently, most new videos of my subscriptions (manually added) do not show up on time. they often pop up in retrospect, maybe after another person has watched that video on the piped instance.
on ios yattee allows use of both invidious and piped instances and the difference in reliability is night and day between the two. i truly hope the project makes further strides in and achieve a stable experience.
[+] [-] ksjskskskkk|2 years ago|reply
every time it crashed failing to parse some video is even more reason to use it!
[+] [-] FireInsight|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lupusreal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_third_wave|2 years ago|reply
[1] as in 'the app crashes', not 'the video does not play', the former is a crash while the latter is an incompatibility with Youtube and tends to be solved by upgrading Newpipe.
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|2 years ago|reply
The only other experience-breaking issue I ran into is lack of support for multiple language tracks, which also seems fixed :)
[+] [-] iforgotpassword|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangepurple|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpaghettiCthulu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notesinthefield|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7839284023|2 years ago|reply
You could try e.g.: https://github.com/arichorn/uYouEnhanced + https://github.com/powenn/AltServer-Linux-PyScript (or alternatives)
I dislike that I have to sideload the app every week again or it stops working but better than nothing I guess.
[+] [-] rzr|2 years ago|reply
On my freebox mini 4k (french ISP box) experience does not improve over time, but I'll give a try on latest.
[+] [-] smusamashah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkwater|2 years ago|reply
OTOH on the desktop Freetube is basically 10 times better than original Youtube under every aspect, and videos play perfectly. Kudos to Freetube.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autoexec|2 years ago|reply
One of the features new pipe offers that I only started using is the ability to "subscribe" to channels. I never log into youtube, so subscriptions are client side only. They're basically just a list of bookmarks, but newpipe can also go out and pull down a listing of new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to and i can categorize those channels into groups. It's extremely useful!
Newpipe does occasionally stop working, but it's been many months since it last happened. When it does happen, it's never newpipe's fault. Blame google (who sometimes intentionally tries to break things), but when that happens the command line usually still works and updates are pretty fast.
My only complaint really is that sometimes new pipe will clear a long list of queued downloads. I'm not sure what triggers it, but it can be difficult to go back and track down what was queued up. For all I know, that's been fixed in this new update