With Reddit shutting down its API setting a precedent in the corporate tech world (and Reddit was a major outlier in that a ton of their users are technical minded and support third party clients, YouTube does not have that kind of userbase and will not get backlash for it), Twitter doing whatever the fuck they’re doing, and Google already hellbent on destroying ad blockers, the days of Newpipe, Invidious, and Freetube are numbered. Wouldn’t be surprised if they implement Netflix level DRM tomorrow that makes alt clients impossible. I say savour your alt clients while you can guys, you won’t be able to soon.
I’m going to seriously consider completely discontinuing watching YouTube if NewPipe stops working. I still like plenty of non-FLOSS oriented channels that will never even consider a FLOSS or open web solution, but I think I owe it to myself to not accept Google’s bullshit, not even use it from the browser, with or without the adblock ban. Not to protest Google’s actions because I don’t care, but to uphold my own values and interests. I need to heed my own advice and extended rants about big tech.
I also think that I’ll discontinue watching YT once this happens. I simply see no point spending my time in an advertisement-infested shithole, and yet that perfectly describes YouTube when accessed as Google/Alphabet “expects” you to.
Yeah. I have my Subscriptions feed as my default way of accessing YouTube, which combined with Youtube DF (Distraction free YT), which disables the sidebar of recommended content, means I will only watch the videos from the people I’m subscribed to.
I do not think NewPipe Extractor or yt-dlp are stopping anytime soon. See how YouTube-DL still works today, even if throttled. This is someone from a maniac like me who monitors the whole tech scenario like a data archivist watchdog. YouTube is far too huge a service and its video content format makes it a lot more different than other gatekept services like text based social media or the Snapchat kinds (Snapchat is dead).
The only non-downloadable video streaming mechanism I have encountered to date is that of Netu/Hqq.tv, and that gets circumvented by screen recording.
How does Netu/Hqq do it?
If I knew a weakness, I would probably also be thinking of a solution. They have protection against any form of proxying or VPN that disallows any such users from even opening or buffering their videos. Each of their HLS stream packets are inaccessible even from temporary files, and behind some kind of DRM encrypted container in DOM or in memory. Page Inspector helps with nothing. Page source helps with nothing.
The only way I found was to screen record the browser on a computer with no VPN or proxying on.