Holy, now we have Piped, Invidious and viewtube
this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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That's a good thing tough ! Right now they are all a bit unstable and YouTube's new SABR things makes those alternatives kinda unreliable.
I do like Invidious, however, I've never successfully ran it or Piped, and the whole genre of frontends, for any great length of time. I always seem to get whammied by YouTube. On my desktops and laptops I just forward the request to an Invidious or Piped instance via LibRedirect since they seem to have the setup to keep it going.
They are the same thing (YouTube self-hosted frontend alternative) with their own features I guess?
You should test Piped, Indivious and Viewtube and make your own opinion, however Viewtube has been paused so this one is probably not going to have the SABR workaround update Piped and Invidious are working on ?
Right now they are all a bit janky and unstable because of YouTube's new update (SABR, don't know the details) so find one that works as self-hosted and keep tuned.
If you're able to contribute as a dev though, give them some help to speed up the process and contribute to the best YouTube frontend alternatives projects !
also I noticed that it doesn't really protect our privacy if we simply host it on our laptop. and most indivious instance are barely usable (freetube always gives indivious API error) so I guess the best option now is to install some fingerprint blocker and view utb in browser
Yeah, if you self-host only for yourself you lose the privacy feature public instances provide. The purpose when self-hosting is to watch youtube with no-ads, sponsor block...
As you guessed it, YouTube went on frontend crusade and only a few public instances remain (if any?) and those who still work are kinda janky, unstable.
If privacy is an important feature you're looking for, you need to wait until those btillant people behind those frontend find a working workaround :)
hosted it and when clicking on any video it returns Error: non 200 status code. Youtube API returned status code 400. It that caused by SABR? searched on google but doesn't seem like other have this issue on indivious
Sorry can't help, I self-host piped and it seems to still work on the version I'm on, however some people report a non working instance even when self-hosting...
What does SABR stand for? Searching proved to not be very fruitful.
Server Adaptive Bitrate Streaming, see https://github.com/LuanRT/googlevideo/blob/main/src/core/ServerAbrStream.ts. It's a format Google developed to be used by YouTube internally, there's no other service that uses it and thus it's also not supported by any player libraries.
Not sure either but one of the important chances is that Dash (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) is being replaced with a newer system on YouTube.
There are some good innovations in the replacement but its much harder to implement.