I rarely use Youtube, but “something is rotten in Idaho!” – when I play a video, it stops at 0:59 or 1:00. Sometimes it just hangs, most times YT says, “Something went wrong…” I swear it used to work on FF, but now this.
Anyone else seeing this on their L5?
No, I never directly use YouTube anymore.
How are you watching indirectly? I use Playlet (anonymizes and removes ads – even inside the video) on the Roku, and Materialous (doesn’t remove ads inside the videos) on the desktop.
Usually I watch YouTube videos locally offline now.
Oh! Playlet is an Invidious frontend. When Google started blackballing Invidious instances, Playlet coded to do the video ad blocking internally.
Are you saying that Invidious found a way around Google?
To sum up the situation, residential IP addresses are not as easily blocked by Google/YouTube, and Nadeko’s Invidious instance uses one.
Google is changing their API again these days and so things get broken again. When a video stops, Google tries to display something like ads or a popup which you cannot see on invidious. But Invidious have to fix it always again and that takes some time. If the video doesn’t load at all, you are trying to watch it from a server that already has the new API rolled out which breaks videos entirely. This often need even more time to fix. So it’s just a matter of time. It’s annoying, but it is as it is.
Anything I want to watch on youtube (which admittedly isn’t much, almost always a videogame Lets Play), I download first with this:
I recently installed FreeTube flatpak and it shows YT videos ad free, and much quicker loading than YT website itself.
FreeTube is fairly adaptive, but it is not perfect. I set the GUI to about 85% I think in the app settings. Some of the icons for the buttons do not load, either, but not enough to make it unusable.
I didn’t like Freetube last year, but it’s time I check it out again.
But, from a technical standpoint, I wonder if FF chokes YT on other L5s. Do I have a problem or is this a general thing?
It may be a general thing. When I use an extension to spoof the L5 as an iOS device, it will give me the mobile version of YouTube. The video runs smooth for about a minute and then it just stops working for seemingly no reason.
When I have the extension off and use the desktop version of YouTube, the site takes forever to load and the video can be a bit choppy, but it will play the whole video.
Just so! I’m not sure why I picked iOS when I setup the extension, maybe just my general revulsion of Spydroid.