Technology

39619 readers

554 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

YouTube app is the worst (feddit.org)

submitted 1 day ago by sexy_peach@feddit.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Normally I use NewPipe on android. It's an alternative YouTube app that can play videos in the background, doesn't have ads and allows me to download videos and music.

I had the YouTube app disabled with adb on this phone for all the time I've had it. For backup there's always the browser YouTube page.

I must have done something wrong and accidentally clicked install on the YouTube app again, so it activated and was back to normal on this phone.

Holy hell is that app a terrible advertising machine. Every time I click on a YouTube video now I get sent straight to it and it always plays ads and also has text ads all over the GUI so I can't even read the channel info etc while I wait for the ads to go away.

I don't know how people deal with that it would completely make me want to stop using YouTube.

Please do yourself a favor and install NewPipe or ReVanced (I think that's the name of basically the same app but with sponsorblock additionally). Both are on f-droid.org app store as well. Less important because you can manually use NewPipe but you could also disable the YT app with adb so it disappears from your phone.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Don't forget SmartTube for Android TV / Shield / Fire and youtube-webos for LG TVs!

[–] somenonewho@feddit.org 2 points 10 hours ago

Yup that's my way to go.

Revanced on my phone for watching quick videos/on the go and SmartTube on the TV. If I find a longer video to watch I usually start it in Revanced and then play it from history in SmartTube

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Youtube-webos is the single reason why I've resumed watching YT in the livingroom. I had stopped when they introduced the second pre-roll ad and a lot of things became unskippable. Now my old TV is rooted, it doesn't really phone home, it doesn't show ads and it's a breeze. Let's hope it stays that way, because Google is already trying to fight the adblockers for some time now.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You don't even need to root it, developer mode is relatively simple to set up and that lets you install whatever. A pihole is good for stopping it phoning home though.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I believe my WebOS version is so old, they stopped any update or data collection servers. I had developer mode running before. That's perfectly alright. Just a bit annoying to constantly refresh, and somehow my attempts to automate it failed. So one day I rooted it and now I have full ssh access, a homebrew channel... And I would have liked to use that to run an Ambilight, and that requires root. Sadly it requires a newer operating system version so I still don't have any LEDs in the background.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 2 points 22 hours ago

Now you can install the homebrew channel just with developer mode. There's also an app to automatically refresh the timer but I was a little hesitant about the access it wanted so I'm just doing it manually for now.