1y ago

Invidious dragging to a halt

For some time, trying to watch videos on Invidious or Freetube has been a pain. It has been oscillating day by day but now I get like 3 seconds of video for 8 seconds of loading time

Some days ago I saw a notice on top of the webpage in some Invidious instances stating something like "Youtube is trying to impede frontends"

Today i tried going to youtube.com and enabling some requests on uBO and videos loading freakin' fast

Is anyone getting the same?

22 comments

I got sick of some of the various Invidious instances taking 5+ refreshes to load a video, so ended up installing my own instance and its been a much nicer experience
- I suspect one of the ways that Google detects the invidious instances is with the instance's behavior: if a lot of different clients use a given instance, it makes it stand out.
  Therefore using your own instance is a good way to get around that problem. I think I'll try that as well.
  
  Seriously worth a go, takes minutes to setup if you're already ready for docker containers. Restart it often (dailiy is the official guidance, i find it doesnt need that with only me as user, i just do it when it starts to feel sluggish) - and I've put it behind a reverse proxy with auth to keep it to myself

Yeah hard times for privacy focused youtube alternatives... I don't have any issues at the moment with LibreTube on android. But it's bases on the Piped api.
But a few months back there were less working servers. Maybe because of youtube's new policy? Have to investigate invidious and piped github's issue page

YouTube throttles some of the more popular instances. Find a less popular one. I was also finding that thumbnails and subtitles weren't loading on some instances. After switching to a fairly obscure one, everything works. You could also try piped which I find generally works better and I like the interface better.
- Piped is also hit or miss. I have to change instance almost every day, even the small ones don't always work.

Just host your own instance
- I came across this type of comment a lot in the past and want to elaborate on this further for context.
  Public instances draw a lot of eyeballs and the tech companies go after them. Private instances are less impactful and get left alone.
  I really can't overstate how miserable my video watching experience was becoming prior to self-hosting. I jumped from Piped -> Invidious -> PipedMaterial over the span of a few months as the best instances started to crap out. I used libredirect and regularly cycled through instances w/ the keyboard shortcut to find a easily watchable video.
  Eventually, I bit the bullet and self-hosted a docker container of Invidious and it's like night and day. Everything just works, and you can program libredirect so that it operates as if it were a public instance.
  In my experience, a lot of public instances initially work perfectly, and then get targeted and hamstrung by big tech. I think of them less as solutions and more as demos to use until things get buggy. I have had the same experience w/ teddit and searxng.

FreeTube with local API works good. Same with NewPipe
- yeah on Newpipe videos load fine. thanks to your comment I noticed Freetube is giving me an error with local API, so that's why
- Yeah Freetube has been problem-free for me so far. I just used it an hour ago. Worked great.
  I also regularly JDownloader Plex for longer form video podcast stuff I like watching at the gym. Also no issues there.

I’ve found small invidious instances seem to work better. There’s also Piped
- damn, even with seeing the bot around here i forgot to try Piped these days
  anyway, i've found a solution - i had "proxy videos through Invidious" turned on on Freetube (which was redundant since i'm behind a VPN). i've unchecked it and things seem fime now
  still, thank you

I've just finished 50 minute podcast via piped, worked just fine, recommend you to use some obscure instance and it works great.

thanks everyone for the feedback. while unaware, I was still using Invidious in Freetube through the setting "Proxy videos through Invidious". it's turned off now and working fine
how can i find such "obscure" instances, tho? i've always picked one from the Invidious' website public list and, upon testing, all of them seem slow right now
also, I had forgotten to try Piped, which is working fine
on a side note, I'd never understood why Piped was made, given that Invidious exists, but here it is, in case anyone wants to know

No issues with Freetube here either, never had any either. Running most things on defaults.

Well, I've been having slow issues on Youtube (I use adblocker) and Invidious. I think the fight against adblockers is related. After all, invidious is also a way to access content without those annoying ads.

Freetube works fine if you use the local API, but most Invidious instances don't work at the moment

Can't say I've noticed myself with FreeTube to be honest, local API, I've been using it for years now and it's probably as good as it's ever been. The fallback for me if it ever doesn't work is yt-dlp.

22 comments