Free alternative to youtube

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caoszu82
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Joined: 11/14/2018

Hi, Are there free alternatives to Youtube?

Thanks.

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

You can watch YouTube videos with Invidious:

https://invidio.us

And you can upload videos to a public MediaGoblin instance.

caoszu82
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Joined: 11/14/2018

Thanks. I registered. I tried to play some videos but always appeats this message and the video doens't starts. The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported. Could you please help me?

chaosmonk

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Joined: 07/07/2017

I have a suspicion as to why this is. Can you link to one of the videos that won't play so I can check?

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

Yes, please post a link or links to the videos that won't play. I use it all the time, have been playing music on it all morning today, and haven't had that problem for months.

caoszu82
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Joined: 11/14/2018

The problem is with all videos. I run invidio with mozilla firefox and the videos load withouth problem. I use IceCat usually.

chaosmonk

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Joined: 07/07/2017

Okay, if it works in Firefox then it's not Google geoblocking, which was my first guess.

Are you using Icecat 52 or 60? It works for me with 60.

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

I get that error message in IceCat if I have the "Searxes' Third-party Request Blocker" enabled in Extensions (I think this is currently a default extension with IceCat 60.3.0esr).

I can either disable the extension, or tell the extension to allow that particular video to play, and then it plays fine. I think the extension does not like the fact that the data is being imported into invidio from youtube. It throws up two or three "googlevideo.com" requests it does not like on most videos.

chaosmonk

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> I get that error message in IceCat if I have the "Searxes' Third-party Request Blocker" enabled in Extensions (I think this is currently a default extension with IceCat 60.3.0esr).

Ah, you're right. I forgot that I disabled that specifically because it was breaking Invidious. I couldn't figure out a way to whitelist all videos, and it became too much of a pain to do it for each video individually.

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

> I forgot that I disabled that specifically because it was breaking Invidious

Me too. Hope that helps the OP, and it isn't something more difficult.

zigote
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Joined: 03/04/2019

Use uMatrix.

Magic Banana

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Beside the facts that https://invidio.us provides Youtube's catalog, does not use proprietary JavaScript and, as far as I understand, protects against Google's profiling, one of its greatest features is the link, on any channel, to subscribe to that channel in an RSS client (such as Liferea, by default in Trisquel).

Completely separate from Youtube, PeerTube is a technically (P2P), socially (federation, no ads, etc.) fantastic project that is ramping up: http://joinpeertube.org

zigote
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Joined: 03/04/2019

> as far as I understand, protects against Google's profiling

The connection to the actual video is a connection to googlevideo.com so Google still knows that the combination of your IP address and HTTP user agent is watching a particular video. Whether Google uses this info for profiling, combining it with data from other sites you visit, we can only speculate. But it is technically possible.

BTW YouTube itself also provides RSS for video channels.

caoszu82
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Joined: 11/14/2018

The reason why i could'nt watch the videos were because the Block third party requests was checked. Thanks to everybody for the information. Invidio is a very good alternative to youtube.

caoszu82
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Joined: 11/14/2018

By the way, I can't post comments in invidio. I don't see the box to introduce the comments. Can anyone help me please?

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

I don't have a comment box. If you post comments from Invidio.us, wouldn't you be throwing out any and all privacy protections? You'd have to be signed into a google account for one thing.

caoszu82
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Joined: 11/14/2018

I don think post comments is throwing out privacy protections. It's freedom of expression. The comments could be done in anonymous way.

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

Well, the comments that are listed on Invidio.us are pulled from youtube. So, if you wanted to add to those comments, you would have to do it through google's youtube comment system. I guess you could do it anonymously on youtube through Tor. But I don't know how Invidio.us could give you anonymous youtube commenting, since you would have to be logged into a google account to leave a comment.

caoszu82
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Joined: 11/14/2018

That's right.

chaosmonk

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Perhaps a feature could be added later for users to post comment from their Invidious account for other Invidious users to see, but this would really only be useful if Invidious's user base grows significantly, and it would probably be necessary to federate this between Invidious instances.

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

Far as I'm aware, you can only read the YouTube comments, not add your own. There used to be something that used Reddit, but I think it was removed (understandably as it's not terribly useful).