Invidious - alternative YouTube frontend
“ Invidious ” is a web front-end (roughly speaking, web client) for the YouTube site. The project code is written in the Crystal programming language, uses the PostgreSQL DBMS and is distributed under the free AGPLv3 + license.
A little bit about the formation of the project
At the moment, Invidious has been developing for more than a year (for comparison: the Crystal language is more than four years old), but only in July of last year, its author, Omar Roth announced his project on Reddit, which almost immediately attracted some attention, because soon after this, the most popular counterpart - the web service HookTube - ceased its "normal" work, due to the legal requirements received by Google (after all, just a week before this event, the first mention of this service appeared on Habré! ). The main purpose of HookTube was to proxy user requests to Google servers (YouTube), which, although it improved the privacy of users, and also allowed them to watch and download any videos (including those with geographical restrictions, for example), for obvious reasons, did not I especially liked Google. And since HookTube relied in its work on the official YouTube API (in contrast to the Invidious), it was not difficult for Google to prohibit HookTube from using it in such a “brazen” way. After that, of course, a wave of disturbances rolled in from the users of the service (yes, especially on Reddit). And although HookTube continues to continue its work, he, according to the author himself, has now become nothing more than a lightweight version of YouTube, useless for 90% of its former users . As a result, the popularity of the service began to fall , and many concerned about such changes, users noticed the Invidious that appeared just in time, which will be discussed further.
Key Features
The author of the project adheres to the monthly release cycle of releases that are not confined to anything else except the release time (the 11th of each month), and are aimed at providing administrators of their own Invidious instances with more or less relevant and stable source code cuts. and for the rest, they have a rather formal meaning. Therefore, we turn to the most interesting characteristics and capabilities of Invidious, available today, at the time of release of the 14th release of the project.
- No ads;
- Self-hosted (i.e. can be installed on your server);
- Lightweight design and the presence of a dark theme;
- Ability to subscribe to YouTube channels;
- You do not need to have a Google account to use;
- Does not use the official YouTube API (like projects like youtube-dl and NewPipe );
- Work does not require the inclusion of non-free JavaScript, and most functions do not require the inclusion of JS at all;
- Ability to save and edit browsing history;
- Internet traffic saving mode and audio mode (also suitable for background playback on mobile devices);
- RSS support (for YouTube feeds and custom feeds);
- The interface is fully localized in Russian, Italian, French, German and Arabic (WIP);
- Ability to embed videos with Invidious on the pages of other sites. Both directly and from YouTube (using a special userjs-script );
- Support for reading comments on videos written on YouTube and / or Reddit;
- Allows you to set the default playback settings (speed, quality, subtitles, etc.);
- Ability to import / export subscriptions (including in the NewPipe format), browsing history and settings;
- Bypassing locks in case the video is not available for the user's country;
- Extended video statistics are available: accurate rating, percentage of engagement, Wilson score .
Also worth noting is that Invidious provides its own API for developers . At this point, the Invidious API uses the FreeTube app, the MusicPiped music player and the CloudTube website. Invidious support has been added to youtube-dl version 2019.02.18.
Support for completely disabled YouTube annotations on January 15 is expected soon. This was made possible due to the fact that the community had previously created an archive of annotations for about 1.4 billion videos.
TL; DR. Give it a try!
There are several Invidious "instances", including the official Invidio.us ( blocked on the territory of the Russian Federation; it has a mirror in the Tor network ), the financial support of which is provided by user donations. Custom instances are available:
Those who want to quickly install Invidious on a server from Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS can do this using the Invidious-Updater script.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/441972/
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