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NewPipe: YouTube client without vertical videos and algorithmic feed
IME newpipe breaks every few weeks or so, presumably because of some youtube change / obfuscation. Or at least that was the case a few years ago.

I've had more success hosting an invidious instance and using the materialious client for mobile. And a bonus is that it comes with sponsorblock built in.

https://invidious.io/

https://materialio.us/

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I found pipepipe to be more stable, break less and have more features.

https://pipepipe.dev/

"IME newpipe breaks every few weeks or so, presumably because of some youtube change / obfuscation."

Same experience. I have a commandline program I wrote to retrieve YouTube download URLs many years ago. On average it has always been more reliable than Newpipe. It continues to work when Newpipe fails and I can fix it quickly when there is a YouTube change

However I noticed recently Newpipe, the original, not SponsorBlock, old version, no updates, had been going many weeks without failure. When it eventually failed I was able to get it working again immediately by simply changing the www.youtube.com IPv4 address

Will try this again when it fails the next time

  • _blk
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Absolutely but I stop YouTube consumption if it's not through NewPipe, so a little productivity boost here and there is not too bad ;)
What’s the point of newpipe? You can block ads with ublock. You can block shorts with browser extensions. What other benefits does newpipe offer?
  • II2II
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Personally, I use it for a chronological feed of my subscriptions. It takes less time to find something worth watching, and it is easier to move on to do something else if there isn't anything worth watching.

Bookmarking or downloading interesting videos is also handy, since they aren't mixed in with my general bookmarks (in a web browser).

"What other benefits does newpipe offer?"

The Javascript source code for Google's YouTube player and the YouTube website is obfuscated and/or minified

The Java or Kotlin source code for Newpipe is not

If one does not like something about Newpipe, one can change or remove it

Newpipe is more pleasant than YouTube on FF Android with uBlock in my opinion. I often search find a video on YouTube, copy the share link into Newpipe and watch there.
What do you mean by pleasant? Is this primarily something for Android users?
Leaner. No ads in layout. Better organized. Not cluttered by buttons nobody asked for.
It can run in the background. I use it to listen to videos before I fall asleep. Ads would mess up this hard and keeping the screen on would be unnecessary use of energy and OLED.
I think that is overstating it, there has been one recent breakage and fix in the last few months or more roughly. It would be interesting to see it plotted out on a timeline though.
I think there was a phase of repeated breakages a while back, but things seem to have stabilised.

Fixes are released quickly ime too.

I use it to mainly download videos, and that seems to break every few weeks. I just updated and it's fixed. Small price to pay.
There is a fork called PipePipe[0] too, that also implements SponsorBlock

0: https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe

Newpipe is great, I tend to spend too much time on youtube. This at least limits it. It does break from time to time.
  • dang
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I think these are the main related past threads:

NewPipe Is Turning 10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45707575 - Oct 2025 (28 comments)

NewPipe 0.26 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38732781 - Dec 2023 (91 comments)

NewPipe – Lightweight YouTube experience for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144400 - Nov 2023 (389 comments)

NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449570 - Feb 2022 (220 comments)

NewPipe – ad-free, open-source Android YouTube client - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23871169 - July 2020 (590 comments)

“My Google account got suspended because of NewPipe” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759 - Oct 2019 (522 comments)

There's also Freetube, which is a fantastic desktop client.

https://freetubeapp.io

is this just a way to browse youtube without ads or tracking, or what?

I'm looking to just hide Shorts, but I want my recommendations. Not sure what's out there for that.

I'd recommend stayfree. It works great on mobile android with feature blocking (shorts and reels) and we'll as time based and scheduled blocks. You can remove the blocks by retyping a long prompt.
For some reason I always preferred having tabs on desktop, so I can having stuff paused to be watched later.
Thanks, I've bookmarked it for later.
Been a long time user of Newpipe. It do occasionally break but not that huge of a deal breaker for me.

Only complaint is I can't select a livestream quality/resolution. I want to catch up to some news live and put those on background but it would use too much bandwidth since it's locked to a higher resolution. In such cases, I would just open them on Firefox, set to desktop mode, and listen from there. Afaik, Invidious doesn't support livestreams.

  • tom_
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Editorialized title! Portrait aspect ratio (or "vertical video", as it's described here - at least I assume that's what the term refers to - like, as if the landscape aspect ratio has no Y axis!) is not obviously mentioned anywhere.
I don't get why the poster thinks NewPipe doesn't support vertical videos (let's not be anal, we know what they mean) if the video is "vertical" then making it fullscreen will fill the phone's screen vertically.
  • tom_
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Well, perhaps you know what they mean! Me? I can only read the words and then guess based on the words I read. If it's not clear from my post what guesses I have made based on the words I have read, and which assumptions I have made while making those guesses, then I apologise. I will try to make it easier for the reader next time.

It sounds like you found no reference to portrait aspect ratio videos in the article either.

I assumed it was just a sloppy way to actually say it has an option to filter out shorts. (Because shorts are always portrait, and it's a common wish to want to eliminate shorts.)

Either way, I also knew what they meant, because "vertical video" is not an inscrutable term that leaves any room to guess it's meaning incorrectly. It's entirely scrutable.

You can keep trying to defend the obtuse complaint that all videos have a vertical dimension, but if it were me I think I would not be so eager to advertise that I was this baffled by this.

Yes, we can assume "vertical video" means "shorts". But once we do that, I still don't see anything on the front page or the FAQ or the github page that mentions shorts. The HN title had "without vertical videos" jammed in and that needs clarification. Maybe there's a toggle somewhere to hide shorts? Or maybe it doesn't have a shorts feed but it otherwise has shorts? Or something else? It's not clear.
I don't either. But I didn't install the app so it's still possible. But yeah I don't see anything either.
  • tom_
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The point of my post was that the title is editorialized. Am I allowed to say "Did you click the link"? Probably not. But, still, let me suggest that you click the link. Once you've clicked the link, compare the title of the page you find yourself on to the title posted here. Now you've compared them, ask yourself: are they the same? I just did this experiment myself, and the answer was: no. The title of the page at time of my click is this: "NewPipe - a free YouTube client". The title of the HN submission at the time I'm composing this message is this: "NewPipe: YouTube client without vertical videos and algorithmic feed".

We are oft implored, not only by our famous and much-valued dang, but also the other guy (whatever his name is. He does a great job too though), not to editorialize the titles by submitting submissions with titles other than the actual title. How can you tell if the submitted title is other than the actual title? That's easy. You read the one and read the other and compare the two and see if they're different. (Which is another way of restating the previous paragraph.) In this case: they are. (Or at least were at time of writing! Since you'll be reading this in the future.) Hence my complaint.

The vertical video thing? That was just my little joke. OF COURSE I KNOW THAT VERTICAL VIDEO MEANS PORTRAIT VIDEO. And, yes, I have visited youtube.com, and have had a big pile of portrait shorts shit up the feed, same as everybody else. I am not completely... wait, hang on. I am completely stupid. Because I thought it would be so obvious that it was a joke, that nobody would bother to quibble. They'd just chuckle at my attempt to amuse the reader, or roll their eyes at it and ignore it, and then go on to moan at me about some other part of my post. Though, reading my post again, more fool me perhaps. I guess I didn't leave people enough other material to complain about.

Sorry. I'll try to do better in future.

The issue is I like the algorithmic feed, as well as having all my subscriptions there. I believe that's not available in NewPipe without manually adding all subscription channels.
NewPipe can parse a Google data export dump and import all of your subs.
newpipe used to work great for me. but for the past month or so I can't watch a video without being prompted to sign in. this is despite constantly switching vpn servers. others don't seem to have this problem. I wonder if my device has been fingerprinted and blocked somehow.
I've been using and loving NewPipe since 2015 or 2016--whenever it first showed up on Fdroid. Really like the ability to play songs from bandcamp too. Although there's one bug in the bandcamp workflow that I wish was fixed: If you search for an artist then tap the artist page in the results this will take you to the albums screen. Click to the album, then if you either use the back arrow or swipe back you're returned to the search results rather than the list of albums on the artist page.
What's the difference of NewPipe to ReVanced?
Revanced is a mod for the official Android app, where NewPipe is an original app.

In practice this means that Revanced will be much more feature complete than NewPipe.

It also means revanced is legally dicey whereas newpipe is essentially a legal frontend/scraper of YouTube.
Revanced is only distributed as patches, probably to avoid being susceptible to the claims against the original Vanced.

Worth noting that ReVanced has a lot more patches than just YouTube.

For the desktop, I recommend https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions
I don't use YouTube much nowadays. It's better for your mental health. I mostly use a fork called Tubular that has sponsored block
If only it worked. We need a good alternative to YouTube that still let's creators feed themselves...

Though I don't think it will ever happen...

Brilliant? Nova? It won't happen if you don't support it.
What's Brilliant?
https://brilliant.org/

> an online, interactive learning platform designed to teach STEM subjects—math, science, and computer science—through active problem-solving rather than passive, pre-recorded video lectures

https://nebula.tv/ was the other one I was thinking of.

I see no mention of not playing vertical videos on their website.
It absolutely works with YouTube shorts. It just doesn't put them in your subscriptions or let an algorithm feed them to you.
  • cxr
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What's an algorithm?
See also: Tubular

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.polymorphicshade.tubular...

Context: Tubular is a fork of NewPipe that adds SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike integration.
SwizzTube for iOS is also great
I use LibreTube: https://libretube.dev/
I primarily use NewPipe, but I'll also throw out Grayjay as a client with similar benefits. They work a little differently and since Google sometimes pushes out breaking changes to YouTube's API, I'll switch to Grayjay while I wait for the eventual NewPipe update. In my experience, the Grayjay player also tends to work better with live streams.
I love newpipe I've watched hundreds of hours of videos on my shield tv with it.
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