If you have any sense of privacy, you know better than to use Google’s official Youtube clients - not to mention, they’re really kind of terrible.

To view Youtube video comfortably and limit Google’s privacy invasions, the main third-party clients are:

• NewPipe and derivatives (Android)
• Grayjay (Android)
• Freetube (Desktop)
• Grayjay desktop - x64 only (Desktop)

Unfortunately, if you’ve been using those third-party clients for a long time, you know Google plays a game of cat and mouse with them, to discourage users from using them:

• Google breaks something or other (usually the player API) or Google blocks your IP because it detects a non-Google player.
• The developers of those clients play catch-up, make their clients work again for a while.
• Google breaks them again. Rinse. Repeat.

And Google now having free rein to be as abusive as they want under the Trump regime, it’s not getting any better ☹️

The developers who react most quickly to Google’s shenanigans are the FUTO developers behind Grayjay: when Google breaks it, usually they have a fix within hours, if not less. And there’s a reason for that: they’re paid to do it. Incidentally, I encourage you to purchase a FUTO license: it’s money well spent to encourage FUTO. They’ve really earned it.

The Newpipe developers are also fairly quick to fix their client. Not always, but they do a pretty decent job.

Freetube however can take many days to get fixed. For instance, the native Freetube player is currently broken and it’s been broken for a week.

When Google plays with everybody’s balls, if you’re on mobile, at least Grayjay will almost always get the job done, so you don’t have to compromise your privacy and hit the official client.

On the desktop however, unless you have an ARM64 machine and you use Grayjay as a desktop app in Waydroid - which is a totally valid solution that works great, in case you didn’t know [EDIT: this is incorrect: there is in fact an x64 Grayjay desktop client - Thanks @portnull@lemmy.dbzer0.com], Freetube will sadly let you down regularly for a long time.

The official workaround recommended by the Freetube developers when Google breaks their player is to use an external player. But there are two problems with that:

• If you don’t use the right external players - which Google likely broke too - or the player isn’t configured to use the latest and greatest Google evasion code, it’s not going to work.
• When spawning Freetube with a URL (typically by LibRedirect from your browser), Freetube ignores the external player and tries to play the video with its broken internal player anyway. You can always manually tell it to use the external player after it’s failed trying to play the video itself, but it’s an extra step, and you end up running both Freetube and the external player just to view a Youtube video from a website.

So I figured I’d post a little guide on how to setup an external video player that works with Freetube (and gets fixed quickly when Google breaks it) and how to spawn it directly from your browser to view a video and bypass LibRedirect / Freetube entirely.

This little guide is mostly for Linux. If you’re not running Linux, the principle should be the same, but the details of how to make this work are different of course.

So the player you need is SMPlayer. SMPlayer is a great mpv player frontend in its own right. Don’t worry, both mpv and SMPlayer are usually available in most distros, so you can install it normally with your favorite package manager.

But the thing that makes SMPlayer great is, to play Youtube video, it can use yt-dlp as a backend to fetch the video from Youtube:

And it turns out, the developers of yt-dlp are usually very quick to unfuck Google’s fuckeries and make it work again. Almost as quick as FUTO’s developers: when Google breaks things, yt-dlp is usually one of the first Youtube clients to start working again.

The problem is, the version of yt-dlp that comes in most distributions is usually hopelessly behind, so it won’t work with your distro’s official package.

To use the latest and greatest yt-dlp with SMPlayer, you need to use the version in the Github repo. To do this:

• Clone the repo (for example in your home directory): git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.git
• Make yt-dlp available in your PATH: ln -s ~/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.sh ~/.local/bin/yt-dlp

Then if you invoke yt-dlp from any directory, it should start it correctly:

$ yt-dlp  

Usage: yt-dlp [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]  

yt-dlp: error: You must provide at least one URL.  
Type yt-dlp --help to see a list of all options.  

Then you can try if SMPlayer now plays a Youtube video correctly: smplayer https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw

Finally, configure Freetube to use SMPlayer as an external player:

Now try to play a video from Freetube: it should open SMPlayer and SMPlayer should play the video correctly.

When Google breaks yt-dlp again, simply go into the repo and do a git pull --recurse-submodules. Do this regularly until the yt-dlp folks work their magic and fix it, which should happen a lot quicker than fixing the internal Freetube player.

Finally, how to spawn SMPlayer directly from the browser:

• Install the RunWith browser extension: this little thing is a simple tool to spawn an external program from the browser and it’s really underrated. Not terribly user-friendly to install but it does the job fine.
• In the RunWith extension preferences, configure RunWith like so:

Then if you right-click on a Youtube video link, you’ll get an option in the context menu to open it with SMPlayer through RunWith:

I hope this helps 🙂