Using Invidious by default instead of YouTube

[keeganjk]

Checklist

• I checked, but didn't find any duplicates (open OR closed) of this issue in the repo.
• I have read the contribution guidelines given at https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/blob/HEAD/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md.
• This issue contains only one feature request. I will open one issue for every feature I want to request.

Describe the feature you want

It could also be possible and perhaps more extensible to have it possible to put in any custom source/website for the application to attempt to handle rather than only having this functionality working for PeerTube.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe it

I would prefer to not connect to https://youtube.com or https://youtu.be but the application does this by default. It seems to be possible to open Individious videos in NewPipe but it seems I cannot "browse" or search through an Individious instance in the application.

Additional context

How will you/everyone benefit from this feature?

This can give more customizability to the application and make it more extensible. Not only will this allow people to "de-Google" and further themselves from Google sites if they want to, for reasons such as privacy or other choices, it could also allow individuals to utilize a broader variety of sources and perhaps even contribute to a more decentralized web.

[triallax]

To be clear, NewPipe does not currently have an Invidious "backend." If you open an Invidious link in NewPipe, it merely extracts what it needs from it to access the YouTube website directly (e.g. for a video link, it takes the video ID and uses it to get the info from the YouTube website directly). We would need TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor#427 to be implemented first before being able to allow choosing Invidious instances.

rather than only having this functionality working for PeerTube.

I see the point you're trying to make, but Invidious and PeerTube are different beasts. Invidious is merely a frontend to YouTube, so all instances have the same content, while each PeerTube instance stands on its own (but still being able to selectively load videos from other instances).

Also, I believe this should not be enabled by default, but as an opt-in, as the choice of the default Invidious instance would put quite a lot of load on it. Alternatively, there might be an option to choose an instance or communicate directly with the YouTube website when first opening the app (see #859).

[nikhilCad]

https://somsubhra.github.io/github-release-stats/?username=TeamNewPipe&repository=NewPipe&page=1&per_page=5

According to this Newpipe has around 50k active users, so this might put a lot of load on the instance indeed. (Site I got from stackoverflow) (150k if you count downloads of 0.21.7)

[ranjithrajv]

Invidio.us is scheduled to close down.
https://omar.yt/posts/stepping-away-from-open-source

[triallax]

No, you're misunderstanding. What is closing is the https://invidio.us instance, not the Invidious project as a whole.

[ranjithrajv]

https://instances.invidious.io/ is also not available any more. Do you know any other sources to find list of instances?

[triallax]

See https://github.com/iv-org/documentation/blob/master/Invidious-Instances.md.

[aluizioneto]

Taking into account what has been said here, it seems that it would be a better option to have an opt-in feature to choose a specific Indivious instance from which to download the videos. It's also important to mention that not all Indivious instances work as proxies. Some of them are just a front-end to YT, just like NewPipe. It wouldn't make much sense to use these in any way, since they are also downloading through youtube. What does make sense is to allow users to configure NewPipe to extract YT videos through any of the Invidious instances that can work as a proxy: TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor#427

[toas-koas]

Is there any update?

[triallax]

Not yet, no. If anybody is interested on working on this, see TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor#555.