I agree, but most Invidious instances are currently broken, Grayjay isn’t really FOSS and youtube-dl/yt-dlp aren’t really great for watching videos, they’re better for archiving them.
Invidious: News to me. My instance has never been down.
GrayJay: News to me… https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android I can see the full source… and the license seems pretty “free” to me… https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android/blob/master/LICENSE.md with only caveat being that you can’t distribute it for payment. I’m fine with that… and most others should be fine with that too.
ytdl: depends on the service using it. https://www.tubearchivist.com/ uses ytdl and gives you a little frontend for it. Works fine for watching and you can set it to watch for uploads from channels.
If you host your own private instance, it’s less likely to get blocked. But quite a few public instance are having trouble right now.
Grayjay is source-available, but not free & open-source software.
Downloading YouTube videos works, but it’s probably not the desired workflow for most people. It takes up storage space on your disk, and you have to wait for the video to download, before you can watch it. I like Tube Archivist, and use it myself for archiving videos, but I wouldn’t consider it a great solution for just watching videos. I think LibreTube, FreeTube or a self-hosted Invidious instance are better solutions here.
or invidious, grayjay, ytdl, etc…
I agree, but most Invidious instances are currently broken, Grayjay isn’t really FOSS and youtube-dl/yt-dlp aren’t really great for watching videos, they’re better for archiving them.
Invidious: News to me. My instance has never been down.
GrayJay: News to me… https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android I can see the full source… and the license seems pretty “free” to me… https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android/blob/master/LICENSE.md with only caveat being that you can’t distribute it for payment. I’m fine with that… and most others should be fine with that too.
ytdl: depends on the service using it. https://www.tubearchivist.com/ uses ytdl and gives you a little frontend for it. Works fine for watching and you can set it to watch for uploads from channels.
If you host your own private instance, it’s less likely to get blocked. But quite a few public instance are having trouble right now.
Grayjay is source-available, but not free & open-source software.
Downloading YouTube videos works, but it’s probably not the desired workflow for most people. It takes up storage space on your disk, and you have to wait for the video to download, before you can watch it. I like Tube Archivist, and use it myself for archiving videos, but I wouldn’t consider it a great solution for just watching videos. I think LibreTube, FreeTube or a self-hosted Invidious instance are better solutions here.