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by gavinray 2151 days ago
For anyone unfamiliar, Invidious is just Youtube without ads and it lets you turn the screen off on mobile. It also lets you turn videos to an "audio only" mode for speed/bandwidth.

It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use.

It's basically free Youtube Red. Really sad to hear this, hope the creator is better off for it though.
3 comments
ahBef5ei 2151 days ago
It's also the only way I know to have RSS feeds for youtube channels. I hope other instances won't follow invidio.us, that would be a major loss for me. I could run my own instance of course, but then, running an instance to generate a RSS feed to consume it would feel overkilled, better to run a scrapper from cron directly.

Anyway, Invidious was an extremely useful tool, thanks to the author for making it.

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input_sh 2151 days ago
YouTube channels do have their own feeds, but there's no obvious way to get to them.

If it's a small channel, you can just copy the channel ID. Visit their YouTube channel, look at the URL, and construct your URL like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
If it's a larger channel, then the channel ID will be replaced by custom string and you'll have to look at the page source to find the channel ID.

You can also export all of your channels as OPML, which is actually documented (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en) and upload it to your RSS reader.

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ahBef5ei 2151 days ago
Oh, nice. That certainly saves a lot of trouble in my case, thanks a lot :)
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Shared404 2151 days ago
> It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use.

Indeed. I've been using it to play background music for D&D, no more annoying adds.

I may well wind up hosting an instance following this.

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dgellow 2151 days ago
Sounds like a neat way to use Youtube without being tracked by Google analytics. I guess that's the next project I will try to run on my Raspberry Pi :)
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cerberusss 2150 days ago
YouTube tracks you regardless, if I understand correctly. For instance, if you search on DuckDuckGo and there's a YouTube video in the results, you can play it right there. However, DuckDuckGo warns you that you'll be tracked.
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DragoCubed 2149 days ago
I love that Invidious doesn't have an algorithm that changes your recommendations based on what you've watched. It's so freeing.
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