I agree it’s totally unusable, I uninstalled it and went back to Tubular and haven’t had a problem. It’s a shame cause it had a decent UI. The maintainer doesn’t seem to eager to fix it either, when someone made a issue about it on Github his response was “change the instance”. Having said that it’s a little soon to call it abandoned but it should be removed until it’s a functioning app again.
I tried libretube while newpipe was down a few weeks ago and it wasn’t working, went to the matrix room for it and it looked like they were a bit hostile towards people in there about just trying another instance rather than pestering them about it not working. It felt like they weren’t that interested in keeping it working. I didn’t even try asking because i saw the responses people were getting and just deleted the app.
I’m using exclusively Grayjay now that it’s not crashing from background play after unlocking my phone anymore.
LibreTube is not broken. It still works. I could just confirm that.
Piped instances have a lot of issues lately. Very often not plaging videos. There is no denying that. Also Yattee suffers from that.
I haven’t looked into the why and how but some videos play just fine. Including recent ones.
I keep doing my strategy of using both newpipe, grayjay and the apps using piped and just switch between them. They all have their issues from time to time.
I have to agree that Libretube has been hit or miss (a fiasco). Currently, only new videos are working. I believe the request has merit. Perhaps, it worth mentioning that the experience has been quite unstable over the past months. I would recommend presenting Tubular/NewPipe as a preferred alternative, which is unfortunate because Libretube’s interface is indeed better for displaying comments and other features.
Additionally, if possible, it might be helpful to promote alternatives for consuming YouTube type content, in general the Frontend recommendation page lacks pointing alternatives.
I need to use a VPN, and I also need to use servers that are in my country.
YouTube has blacklisted all the IPs from my country, so I’m always asked to login if I want to watch a video, so I can’t use any app that directly connects to YouTube.
My only choice is LibreTube, but even that gets broken by YouTube.
YouTube has decided that they want to put an end to freeloading, and they have taken and will take further actions to prevent it.
You either watch the ads, pay for YouTube Premium, or deal with all of the current issues and all of the issues that will come in the future.
Don’t blame LibreTube, NewPipe, etc. they’re trying their best.
I think I also agree with this. YT (Google) is the one to blame. The frontend tools are doing what they can. Nevertheless, speaking from my personal experience, and since I saw this thread, I thought there were more people who noticed that LibreTube specifically seems to be down more often and has broken videos that work in other apps. Recently, I’ve found myself opening Tubular after trying to watch a video in LibreTube that doesn’t work, and it just plays there with the VPN on. Again, this is my experience, and we probably can’t generalize. I’m not sure what would be a good empirical basis for taking some action.
What about considering that someone new to libretube, me, tried to use it and went into the matrix room, only to be discouraged from asking questions and trying to make it work because they were clearly aggressive woth statements like “how many times do i have to tell you try a different instance” yet different instances clearly weren’t working for anyone at the time. I gave up within five minutes of looking in matrix because it was clearly not going to be a good space to be in and other options were working already.
I’ve been using youtube more on desktop (even freetube has its problems) with a vpn and never been asked to sign in once, same for Tubular. I kept changing instances on Libretube and when I wouldn’t get an error I would wait for the loading screen to finish only to get a black screen. And as @Rasta mentioned the dev clearly has not been helpful in addressing the problems with an “oh well ” attitude. Granted I don’t know what else can be done with this whole mess but it’s sad times for Youtube frontends right now.
” attitude. Granted I don’t know what else can be done with this whole mess but it’s sad times for Youtube frontends right now.