1y ago

Google seems to be blocking API access for Piped video servers

github.com Piped not playing videos · Issue #2809 · TeamPiped/Piped

Official Instance The bug is reproducible on the official hosted instance, or is API-related. Describe the bug For some reason the videos dont load and I cant watch piped. I primarily use piped cau...

Most servers are not able to access the Google API.

Invidious report of the same(ish) problem: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4045#issuecomment-1674373088

141 comments

Not to be a downer but... how did people not anticipate this happening? Google is likely going to do everything they can to shut down non-official clients like Piped, since they're sidestepping all of YouTube's revenue streams. Hopefully they don't take the nuclear option and somehow lock down the API and make it much harder to download videos via tools like yt-dlp.
- I'm pretty sure most people anticipated it at some point. I just seems to be starting now.
- Yeah we're basically hurting their revenue by using Piped and other ways to bypass Google's ads. They wouldn't be profitable if everyone stopped watching those ads
  
  Noooooooooo! The poor google 😢
  their $412,378/s has been reduced to $412,367/s! 😭 😭
  
  They’re making plenty of profit selling all of our data and getting ad revenue from the 95%+ of other users who aren’t blocking them.
- Well, if they implement their web integrity DRM thingy in Chrome and Youtube then that will prevent anything that's not a real approved browser from accessing the website, and with that the video streams. Not only Piped/Newpipe, but anything automated trying to access any website will be automatically locked out unless the website approves of it. New search engine bot? Archiving crawlers? Any type of third party program that accesses some website's content without approval? Dead.
- I'm not going to be popular saying this but how is the service supposed to survive without a revenue stream? It takes a shit ton of bandwidth and storage to keep YouTube running, that ain't free.
  I get that the ads are incredibly annoying but if you truly watch as much YouTube as some people in this thread are claiming, maybe it's worth paying for it? I bit the bullet and for basically the price of my cancelled Spotify subscription I now have no ads in YT and an okay streaming service with yt music.
  Of course Google could do things better. And actually I think it would be important to have a competitor. But I wouldn't expect that one to be free either.
  
  If youtube fixed their content ID system and stopped falsely demonitizing all the creators I watch then I would hapily pay for youtube red (or whatever they call it now). As it is though I'm not giving them my money just for them to pay copyright trolls with some of it. I'd rather give my money to noone than risk having some of it go to the people leaching off the completely broken content ID system.
  
  YouTube should be public infrastructure.
  
  How many people are using Piped, revanced, or the like? I doubt it is the majority. This move is highly likely more greed than anything.
  Does Google care about our user experience? The short answer is no. Look at the intrusive ads, how long they are, them suggesting DRM, right wing pipeline, and more.
  Look at how they treat their content creators. Demonetization, channel and copyright strikes, etc.
  The list goes on. Youtube should and needs to be public. Internet is a utility and needed to survive by everyone. A video hosting service like Youtube is needed as well. Through every perspectice, Google is, ultimately, wrong in doing this.
  
  This is c/privacy. Are you really advocating for pouring money on the company (Google) that's doing everything it can to get to know everyone and use the information for showing deceiving ads, among other things? Or the company that supports false political propaganda? (In the form of paid advertisements). Support your creators, thats a very good thing, but for the love of god please do not fund this data mining machine.
  
  Leave us nerds an opening. The 99% that can't figure out how to put in an adblocker should be able to cover us nicely.
- It amazes me how entitled these Internet hippies are nowadays. You can't expect someone to provide such a huge service for free. If you don't like ads, pay for it. It's like $5 per month when you pay as a group..
  
  I would pay if
  Google promised not collect any data but now you would pay and have your data collected.
  I just want load my subscription feed and they are all there not hidden away.
  Hid shorts or have them on separate tab.
  Bonus would be if related videos where acutely related videos in time span. Not the mess they are now.
  Also why would I have to pay YouTube music? I don’t want that.
  
  I would pay if they let me without compromising my anonymity.
  
  I'd rather Youtube and Google itself be split up under anti-trust laws. I don't want them to exist.
  I'd rather people build smaller video websites for niche subjects so the internet is decentralized to the extent it was when it first started.
  
  They make enough money off the rubes. They should just let us nerds have this one.

If you are using LibreTube this is fixable by disabling piped proxies in the setting. HOWEVER do be warned that Youtube will know your IP, so you should only really do this while using a VPN service.
- Real heroes don't wear capes, they give solid advice.
  ps: thanks
- Thanks. Worked for me.
  Took me a while to find the setting under the audio and video section of the settings, because I was constantly looking for it under instance, general or advanced.
  
  Thank you! I was doing the same thing, this is badly placed.
- Got a question, I just found out about LibreTube from this post. I use NewPipe on phone and FreeTube on laptop, but LibreTube's UI looks really good so want to give it a try. Is "YouTube will know your IP" a concern in terms of privacy or because of something else related to them know your IP is using apps that remove ads?
  I've never been worried about YouTube knowing I use another app to access their stuff, so just curious if this is "just" about Google knowing you IP or something more.
  I know this is the privacy community and don't want to downplay the "Google knowing your IP" part but curious about this and being so explicit on the app setting as well when you turn it on
  
  It is, yes. The issue being they might ban your ip address, which is the first reason why the instances are not playing videos specifically, and then you can not access Youtube servers from the IP you called the servers from. For example, if you use it this way from home without a vpn or orbot, you will likely not be able to access the Youtube servers after a ban from any device that is running over your router directly to the Youtube servers and not over a VPN. I do not know why they do this though, might just be the sheer amount of requests. Not sure, though just don't. Use protection. An Internet condom. Orbot is free and so is the free version of Proton VPN. Do not use random free VPNs though. If the VPN gets banned you slip on another condom.
  
  Also, it is still your choice to use google services. I think if you are new to this (I am no veteran either lol) you should create a very clear threat model. And follow that model. If you notice it's not for you, alter it. If you need sources for what a threat model is, tell me. But basically, you can "downplay" google services all you want. There is probably some guy that is privacy minded and uses a stock pixel or worse a stock Samsung. And for him, that may be the perfect solution, as he doesn't really use his phone anyways or insert random reasoning.

I watch more YouTube than I do television these days.
As of now, I'm able to watch it ad free on both Brave and Firefox. I don't have revanced as I'm more or less too technically stupid to do it.
If it becomes impossible to watch YouTube, I'll walk away from it just like I did cable in 2009 and Netflix in 2023.
I haven't sailed the high seas since the eighties, and I'd honestly prefer not to, but you gotta make a product that doesn't consistently try to piss me off.
- i can really recommend https://freetubeapp.io for desktop.
  
  +1 for Freetube, the best YouTube experience you can get.
  
  Somehow I've missed the existence of this! Thank you for the recommendation!
- What are good firefox add-ons for blocking?
  
  uBlock Origin is really all you need for blocking ads, if you also wanna deal with the whole sponsors on videos SponsorBlock is a good companion!
  
  The only answer is Ublock Origin.
  Aside from that, you can do adblocking for your entire network and everything on it via Pi-hole. It requires no modification for the devices on your network and will work for literally any device connected to it.
  If you combine those two, the odds of seeing any ad anywhere isn't zero, but it is close enough to zero to effectively be zero.
  
  [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/](uBlock Origin)
  
  Ublock origin.
  I also add privacy badger in just to pass of the trackers.
  
  uBlock Origin has worked great for me. No issues.
- It's not trying to piss you off, it's trying to make money, as it should. Do you have any idea how much money it costs to run the infrastructure behind YouTube? Neither do I, because it's unfathomable.
  I pay for YouTube Premium along with 5 friends. It's $5 per month per person. Beats any streaming service by miles.
  I do, however pirate all my movies (except for the occasional cinema visit) and TV shows.
- If all you do is take without contributing you're literally worthless to the platform any every other system you join. Your life will be a series of jumping to the next free platform that eventually crumbles to nothing.
  Don't want ads? Pay for premium. Want no ads and no payment? Why should anyone worry about your views? Your existence and use of a product then is a liability and not an asset
  We've been spoiled hard by free money in the tech space. It's going to bite and there won't be a place to run eventually except community spaces like this that will never quite be sustainable long term.

They are definitely in a crackdown phase. Some revanced versions stopped working just yesterday, the yt-dlp stuff, the ad block block...
The best hope would be to get off of YouTube but that's not happening any time soon given how expensive bandwidth is.
- Any kind of federated alternative would have to use P2P in some way, and I'm not sure how well that would work. Peertube appears to be exactly that, but testing a video just now showed that it was all from servers and none from peers, so how well it would work with thousands or millions of people watching at once, I can't say.
  If I watch something, I'm happy for my outgoing bandwidth to be the cost for that. Most of us have plenty of that to spare, even if my patience for adverts is zero.
  How would content creators be paid? Not my problem, but being paid by advertising has not lead to an improvement in content for the most part. Shovelling out videos with zero actual real content is not something I want to encourage.
- what happened to yt-dlp?

I guess that's it then. If I'm forced to see ads and be tracked I'll just block the domain on my network like I did reddit and invest that time in other things.
- You can always grab a browser extension. Apple has Vinegar, not sure what others run. Just plucks the video feed direct pretty much like Piped. So no ads. Still stuck on YT unfortunately
  
  Would it be possible for many, many people to use yt downloaders to fetch certain categories of yt videos (Linux tutorials for example) and serve them in a decentralized media network like the fediverse? Basically a distributed, downloaded "migration" of yt content, with no central source or authority that the pipe apps can retrieve from instead of YouTube. Yet again, I've basically just reinvented bittorrent but for YouTube content, so maybe it's not that practical...

I just wish Peertube had proper federation and a more accessible interface, some of their decitions sadly make is a unvaiable alternative! :(
- Professional content creators probably aren't going to like the Fediverse in general since the design inherently limits their reach and there's just fundamentally less money in it for them. I don't think it works as a profession in its current form here.
  
  I do think something like Peertube would have a place but as you pointed out it's current desing limits their reach aka lacks proper Federation and the interface is nerdy and kind but absolutely awful to attract users so a failure for a default in my opinion.

Good to know what was going on — I just noticed yesterday that piped vids weren’t loading for me.
- They are working for me tho
  
  There's a whack-a-mole of servers being blocked right now.

We should open our own YouTube, with blackjack... and hookers! That'll show those google guys.
- I mean, peertube exists and it's part of the fediverse. I don't know if lemmy can comment or view the videos, but mastodon sure can.
- We already have peertube and Odysee. But majority of the content still lies in Youtube.

It's time LibreTube moved on from Pipe Backend too. Too many times the app just doesn't work leading to server hopping and more.
I could use NewPipe but the app has a really terrible UI.
- LibreTube existence is built upon Piped as far as I know. Even the developer wants you to donate to Piped instead of LibreTube as far as I remember.
  Isn't Piped the only way to easily mask YouTube history with Google? So I think we should be very thankful of the existence of Piped
  
  Yes, it does help to mask your IP address, but often I have faced issues with Video not loading.
  I have found LibreTube to break more often than NewPipe due to this. There were instances where I was forced to use the Browser to watch the videos as Piped servers were having issues.
  I honestly love all the efforts made by the devs of both to make YouTube so much privacy friendly and ad-free, but from POV of reliability, it just sucks for me.
- NewPipe has been having a lot of issues as well. Videos crash a minute in and the only way to solve it is to clear cache which only works for one video.
- It's not that bad i think. Better than having to endure adds..
- You can tell it not to use Piped for fetching the video, but then that leads to Google knowing what you watches.
  
  It's important to know know that by this google still can't run their own fingerprinting scripts or fingerprinting stylesheets, nor set cookies, so while not ideal, it's not that bad.
  I would suggest that (except when you watch something more private) until this gets somewhat more sorted, turning off video proxying is probably not a huge tradeoff. Also don't forget that FreeTube and NewPipe don't do proxying (FT can be set to do that, though)

Man, just when I downloaded LibreTube. :(

It's actually the exact same problem, Youtube now blocks IPs on the video endpoint aka everything except for the actual stream works which is a new thi g to adapt to, they used to block access entirely before.

Interesting how just a few weeks ago yt-dlp also stopped working, saying it was getting investigated in Germany.

Piped has never worked for me, to the point where I blocked the bot that reposts all YouTube links.
Does YouTube even have an API for downloading videos? That would surprise me, even if it was for a fee. Their whole business model is adverts.

why use proprietary when Peertube is free and libre
- Because content is on youtube, and PeerTube does not have bridging capabilities. That's the reason.
  
  What is bridging?

Just use a different instance. Alternatively you can use peertube
- "just do this or that."
  while I appreciate the attempt to help and provide options, I think your reply largely misses the point of discussing this. Google is going to keep shutting down those options until there aren't any left, just like Reddit with Libreddit / Safereddit.
  
  There’s also not much people can do besides trying these work arounds and trying alternative options. YouTube has been the biggest video host for a decade for a reason, so a true alternative will take time.
  
  Well both of those reddit alternative frontends used the api. Piped scrapes the pages and gets the stream url, similar to teddit, which still works.
  
  What happened with Libreddit? My instance is still humming along same as it ever was.

You could try Clipious from FDroid. It's my fallback for ReVanced.
- I even completely switched from ReVanced to Clipious + private Invidious instance, it's snappy and flawless.
  You can even redirect any Youtube link to an Invidious instance automatically with libRedirect, living the dream.

it's time for odysee I think 🤔
- if anything peertube. fuck odysee and their stupid crypto and ads
  
  Wait-- I'm actually out of the loop on this. Why the downvotes and what's bad about Odysee?

Would be cool if we had some foss AI based video format. Where it stores a 3d scene and animates it. Seen a prototype somewhere for a single face.
Then it'll be cheap enough to host your own stuff again instead of relying on YouTube.
- Nvidia has something like this, I saw it on 2 minute papers…. On YouTube.
  
  You have to enjoy that irony

141 comments