Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alternative front ends

Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by jraph on Saturday October 14, 2023 @05:19PM (#37884373)

I've been using Privacy Redirect and some of the other generalist redirector extension with quite some success. Privacy redirect also redirects twitter to nitter, reddit to libreddit or old.reddit, Google Maps to openstreetmap and other stuff. Redirects can be enabled/disabled to ones taste. That's quite neat.

Combined with my private invidious instance so I can subscribe to channels without this data leaving computers I control.

May your own extension succeed too. I guess building it and releasing it are already two successes on their own.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by kingTug on Saturday October 14, 2023 @05:29PM (#37884425)

Are nitter instances still working? I was under the impression that project died when Elon curtailed api access.

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Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by askiiart on Saturday October 14, 2023 @05:45PM (#37884539)

Yep, nitter still works.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by mirashii on Saturday October 14, 2023 @06:23PM (#37884793)

Although not out of the box right now, it requires running some external scripts to grab guest accounts and running a build off a branch or fork. See https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/983

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by petemir on Saturday October 14, 2023 @06:24PM (#37884798)

They keep working with a workaround, by using guest tokens handed out to the Android application. So, until they change the functioning of the app, it will keep working.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by Modified3019 on Saturday October 14, 2023 @07:08PM (#37885110)

I used the official nitter.net instance successfully just yesterday, at least with the limited functionality I cared about.

It’s likely to come and go as they fight an arms race.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by koito17 on Saturday October 14, 2023 @08:01PM (#37885468)

You're probably thinking of libreddit, which indeed shut down when Reddit's API access was shut off. Now most libreddit instances out there either return a 429 error or simply don't exist anymore.

Nitter on the other hand has been doing fine on my end. Instances with heavy traffic, such as nitter.net, do frequently run into rate limiting errors. But if you use relatively more obscure instances, then almost nothing has changed.

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Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by SanjayMehta on Saturday October 14, 2023 @08:55PM (#37885777)

nitter.cz is still working complete with RSS support.

nitter.nl/net work, but without RSS.

Many of the other instances have become unreliable.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by d3vr on Saturday October 14, 2023 @06:02PM (#37884665)

Thanks for sharing your setup, might look into that. In my case, the reason I decided to create the extension is that I didn't want to completely leave YT per se, but rather use the recommendations and browse the homepage and actually watch what I want on an alternative frontend.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by TaylorAlexander on Saturday October 14, 2023 @08:44PM (#37885720)

Is it able to feed user interactions back to YouTube? I want to like and comment on videos I like.

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Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by saxonww on Saturday October 14, 2023 @09:49PM (#37886086)

Yeah it's a shame these aren't available for Firefox Mobile. At least one of the redirect plugins would be nice.

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Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by jraph on Saturday October 14, 2023 @11:35PM (#37886635)

I remember reading that firefox mobile is going to allow all extensions? Or maybe it's the case of the version coming from F-Droid?

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Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by citruscomputing on Sunday October 15, 2023 @01:28AM (#37887125)

There is a hacky workaround you can do to add any extension to ff mobile, it involves making a personal collection: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

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Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by gear54rus on Saturday October 14, 2023 @10:10PM (#37886224)

While we're on the topic of unfucking youtube, do you know how I can turn shorts crappy player without controls into something that I can rewind? Sound volume controls would be nice too.

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Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by jraph on Saturday October 14, 2023 @11:37PM (#37886653)

Invidious uses its regular player for shorts.

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Re:Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alterna... by jellyblade on Sunday October 15, 2023 @12:07AM (#37886795)

If you're watching on desktop, you can change the youtube video's url path from /shorts/video to youtube's usual ?watch=video and have it play in youtube's regular player. You can also just have an extension do this for you, which is what I do.

[ Parent | on HN ]