Customize YouTube to work exactly the way you want it to.
I'm using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
Am I the only one that hates third-party clients for Desktop? They all have terrible UI and UX. Firefox + UBlock + Youtube is the way to go. For the phone it's NewPipe or Grayjay.
The best part about FreeTube unlike other Third-Party clients is that it retains a better YouTube-like suggestions system for any videos you wanna watch next. Discoverability is still a very important thing for me
My lg tv is jailbroken so I have the ad blocked version of YouTube on it, but I was on my Chromecast with Google tv yesterday and decided to go back to the regular YouTube app since I was there.
I was watching a video of 20 minutes in length, and got one 30 second ad at the start; ok fine.
After 4 minutes, they decided to show me a 50 second unskippable ad.
I backed out of the video, and deleted the regular app.
Oh shit, I just made the switch and I'm liking it. I just "favourite" things from my sub feed in one small window, and watch in the other, and it autoplays (if I want) so I can just start doing shit while the background vids keep playing. Honestly kinda more convienient than youtubes gui. It has sponsorblock built in too, which is nice
The recommendation algorithm is the reason I use YouTube. Well over half of the videos I'm watching are from channels I'm not even subscribed to. Ads can be blocked as always.
I agree; between it and Tubular, YouTube is usable again.
That said, someone pointed out that higher resolutions are not viewable on FreeTube. I hadn't noticed this until they mentioned it, and now I notice it constantly. I don't know why, but it's demonstratable: find a 4k video on Tubular, and open the same video on FreeTube, and only lower resolution versions are available.
yeah I agree! My wife would hear bitchin me if we would watch something on her iphone as i would constantly point out the fucking ads.. I use in on my Fedora but sometimes (like once a month) I have a problem with the invidous instances. I wish there would be something similar to use on android, bu fortunately with Firefox& SponsorBlock it seems to block most of them...
I would like Freetube 100x more if it had a web UI instead of a non-browser interface. A web UI with a companion extension to automatically redirect YT video links to it could be so seamless.
If it's hosting a server on the local network that would also provide a perfect solution to not having any way for view history or settings to automatically sync between different devices.
Have been using it a while since the browser fiasco. It's awesome but the workflow has a few niggles:
I'd love a theater mode that uses the full width of the window but still allow the title and comments below. No sidebar or scrollbar besides the video, more like MPV.
Also LibRedirect isn't perfect with embedded videos. I'd just like to have a link I can click so it opens in FreeTube.
And links from the browser are always opened in the first active window instead of opening a new window.