>but 75% of the time it fails to play the video

I would quibble with that. It's really all or nothing. Youtube changes something, NewPipe breaks entirely. Then NewPipe is updated, and it works perfectly again.

I like NewPipe, but in practice this means you just have to accept that there will be stretches, a few days or a week long, where it just doesn't work at all.

Actually, that's the funny thing. I noticed that I could find videos that work, while others didn't.

i think monotised videos die easier than non-monotised ones. leave it long enough and they all die.

Monetized* or monetised for those with a British bent.

Unless you're talking aboit videos that had stereo audio that have been converted to mono. (;

Odd.

I know what you're talking about since I have experienced it before, but I have not encountered the problem often in the past year or so. Perhaps you were just using it during a dry spell from the NewPipe developers or F-Droid. A number of useful features have been added during the past year, such as the ability to view live streams. A few quirks also exist, such as feeds displaying videos that are posted in the future.

As for the recommendation engine, I prefer gaming it. NewPipe is wonderful because it does not feed it. I have a special profiles setup on my desktop for when I want to feed it. This approach works wonderfully for discovering new channels, allows for multiple profiles to get recommendations for different viewing interests, avoids polluting recommendations based upon a single odd-ball view, and allows finer grained control over the information that I feed Google.

I was experiencing it. Then I realised f-droid just hadn't updated in a while - no doubt it's that Google battery saver feature where the programs I want my phone to run to achieve some background task get banned.

Since updating manually (in f-droid) i have been a happy camper.

F-droid sometimes lags a couple days behind the latest updates. Usually the parsing errors are fixed within a day or two and made available on the official site before f-droid. As far as I know, those are usually caused by updates to youtube itself.

It's because F-droid builds these every week instead of as soon as it is out.

Yeah honestly as far as app repositories go, f-droid's usually pretty good at keeping things up to date. I use it for most apps I can get off there, newpipe's about the only one I bother grabbing straight from the site because I get impatient.

Yes. Just installed it. Result on first video: Exception in NewPipe 0.19.3

    {"user_action":"requested stream","request":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRdkI09KCpk","content_language":"en_US","service":"YouTube","package":"org.schabi.newpipe","version":"0.19.3","os":"Linux Android 8.0.0 - 26","time":"2020-07-18 05:29","exceptions":["org.schabi.newpipe.extractor.stream.StreamInfo$StreamExtractException: Could not get any stream. See error variable to get further details.\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.extractor.stream.StreamInfo.extractStreams(StreamInfo.java:192)\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.extractor.stream.StreamInfo.getInfo(StreamInfo.java:70)\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.extractor.stream.StreamInfo.getInfo(StreamInfo.java:62)\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.util.ExtractorHelper.lambda$getStreamInfo$3(ExtractorHelper.java:116)\n\tat org.schabi.newpipe.util.-$$Lambda$ExtractorHelper$5fJcha6Sq5APJBLdG6osaJby-mc.call(Unknown Source:4)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.single.SingleFromCallable.subscribeActual(SingleFromCallable.java:44)\n\tat io.reactivex.Single.subscribe(Single.java:3438)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.single.SingleDoOnSuccess.subscribeActual(SingleDoOnSuccess.java:35)\n\tat io.reactivex.Single.subscribe(Single.java:3438)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeFromSingle.subscribeActual(MaybeFromSingle.java:41)\n\tat io.reactivex.Maybe.subscribe(Maybe.java:4154)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeConcatArray$ConcatMaybeObserver.drain(MaybeConcatArray.java:153)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeConcatArray$ConcatMaybeObserver.request(MaybeConcatArray.java:78)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.flowable.FlowableElementAtMaybe$ElementAtSubscriber.onSubscribe(FlowableElementAtMaybe.java:66)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeConcatArray.subscribeActual(MaybeConcatArray.java:42)\n\tat io.reactivex.Flowable.subscribe(Flowable.java:14479)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.flowable.FlowableElementAtMaybe.subscribeActual(FlowableElementAtMaybe.java:36)\n\tat io.reactivex.Maybe.subscribe(Maybe.java:4154)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.maybe.MaybeToSingle.subscribeActual(MaybeToSingle.java:46)\n\tat io.reactivex.Single.subscribe(Single.java:3438)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.operators.single.SingleSubscribeOn$SubscribeOnObserver.run(SingleSubscribeOn.java:89)\n\tat io.reactivex.Scheduler$DisposeTask.run(Scheduler.java:578)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.schedulers.ScheduledRunnable.run(ScheduledRunnable.java:66)\n\tat io.reactivex.internal.schedulers.ScheduledRunnable.call(ScheduledRunnable.java:57)\n\tat java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:266)\n\tat java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.run(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:301)\n\tat java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1162)\n\tat java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:636)\n\tat java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:764)\n"],"user_comment":""}

And this isn't on anything hard or new. It's a London Underground technical video.

You probably installed from some app store?

You need to install from the github repository. Youtube changes interface every once in a while, this is really isnt any app's fault, but youtube's. Same thing happens to youtube-dl all the time.

Yes, F-droid, which NewPipe says they support.

If the app crashes with a Java stack backtrace, it's the app's fault.

This app is not for you. Use the mainstream.

Is it just me or has HN seen a huge influx of less-than-the-current-average "computer intelligence" in the last 6 months?

you don't know what you are talking about. invest a minute and check out animats history.

Looks like you have an old version. It says 0.19.6 is the current release. I haven’t tried this app but I suspect getting up to date will fix that.

Yeah, F-Droid is kinda slow. You can fetch the apk directly from Github, though.

If you want to run your own Fdroid repository, it's quite simple to automate for releases from GitHub/gitlab apis. There's probably some way to automate it completely with GitHub actions even (I've been too lazy to learn to do it properly, so everything I do is just through local scripting on my computer, with netlify signing Fdroid releases for me).

Due to Fdroid being so slow at updating indexes on my older devices, I actually use a secondary Fdroid client (nethunter client also has a privileged extension) for manual updates, which only has my personal repos enabled.

same experience when i was on android (around v7) and f-droid. it basically crashed/failed every time. i use ytdl quite a lot and updating it once every few months is sufficient ...