YouTube alternative frontends
Invidious
Website: https://invidious.io/
Source code: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
Self-hosting: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#docker
Piped
Website: https://piped.video/
Source code: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
Docs: https://docs.piped.video/
Self-hosting: https://docs.piped.video/docs/self-hosting/
Advantages over Invidious:
- Uses way too much resources.
- Total bandwidth limited by the peak capacity of the load balancer.
- Coded in Crystal, a language that is relatively hard for beginners.
- Caching is done at a backend level.
- Invidious was a learning project.
- Invidious crashes all the time.
- Various hacks are required to keep an instance running at a reasonable stability.
Advantages over NewPipe:
- Your IP is exposed to YouTube.
- Feeds are slow to load/update in comparison to YouTube.
Drawbacks of Piped:
- JavaScript is required
- Browsers without Service-Workers support will feel significantly slower. Eg: Tor Browser
Not supported by FreeTube
FreeTube
Desktop app based on Electron available for Windows, Mac & Linux
Website: https://freetubeapp.io/
Source code: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
Docs: https://docs.freetubeapp.io/
NewPipe
Android app.
Website: https://newpipe.net/
Source code: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
Docs: https://teamnewpipe.github.io/documentation/
LibreTube
Android app that uses the Piped API.
Website: https://libre-tube.github.io/
Source code: https://github.com/libre-tube/LibreTube
F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.libretube/
- NewPipe does the extraction locally
- Google gets the user's IP address
- subscriptions can only be stored locally
- LibreTube uses a Piped instance that include the NewPipeExtractor
LibRedirect
Browser add-on
Website: https://libredirect.codeberg.page/source_code.html
Source code: https://codeberg.org/LibRedirect/libredirect