Converting a youtube link to any alternative front-end is as i remember correctly as easy as changing the youtube.com part to whatever the front-end link is. I think pipedbot should use the open source link redirection service called farside. It take care of automatic redirection when a front-end is momentarily dead and also do some load balancing by redirecting between multiple self-hosted front-ends so as to not Hug a single one to death while others get barely any use.