This was my experience as well. Other people on the LibreTube issue tracker also reported the same:
Iâm getting the same error even with the option âdisable piped proxyâ enabled.
Being active, shouldnât this option prevent this problem?
To reference a similar scenario of a frontend being thwarted by the âupstreamâ service/platform, Nitter was removed as a recommended frontend after it was declared discontinued by the core developer and after almost all[1] Nitter instances became rate-limited.
Of course, LibreTube is different because, as expressed above, it should work regardless of the state of Piped instances, but disabling the Piped proxy does not seem to change anything.
Edit: For anyone interested, a core maintainer of LibreTube briefly explains why the âDisable Piped proxyâ option cannot circumvent the issue of unreliable Piped instances:
Disabling the Piped proxy does exactly what it is expected to, itâs explained inthe settings btw. It no longer proxies video streams and images through Piped.
Video information such as the video stream source to load the actual video from are still fetched from Pipedâs API, whatâs giving the error message described above.
Iâm adding this qualifier because there are a couple of instances still around and functioning under constraints. âŠď¸
It really matters as LibreTube doesnât show you a captcha box like in the site. If these sites/apps could solve that Captcha. Then we could use without errors. But we are hesitant as we people donât like to connect to Googleâs domain.
You seem to be the only ones not having problem. What configuration do you use ? No VPN ?
BTW, I just downloaded LibreTube again, disable Proxy option, and still had the âSign In to âŚâ error on 30 videos out of 32. The 2 others werenât working for other reasons.
I can reproduce what I explained in the post above. I canât watch videos on LibreTube with the Piped proxy disabled unless I change to a different VPN server because the one that Iâm using 99% of the time is blacklisted by YouTube.
If a front end isnât working as a front end and yet other front ends are working or are at least doing as much as they can to stay working, then shouldnât the functional ones be the ones getting recommended. The developer isnât communicating and isnât updating quickly. We have apps and services that arenât recommended because they donât update quickly enough. Why should Libretube get a free pass?
I now understand why the developer is acting the way he is.
If I was in his position where all the issues that are the fault of Piped or YouTube were always reported to me and I had to constantly repeat, âSwitch to another Piped instance,â etc., then I would have probably gone completely insane.
Newpipe and freetube have been consistently updating and working around it while Libretube has just been down since this started. The whole point of the site is to recommend tools to people who are generally starting their privacy journey and having tools that arenât communicating well or working for extended periods of time isnât great. Invidious for example just did a purge of the instances that were having playback issues.
At the very least there should be a disclaimer put up about issues youtube is causing for front ends, but the behavior demonstrated by the libretube team is enough for me to never recommend them to anyone at this point.
If you use Protonâs streaming servers, then thatâs why !
Not really. It is a soft ban because Grayjay still works by spoofing that my request comes from an iOS device. On Proton free servers though(I only use Mullvad), it is a hard block - and no one can bypass it.
Iâm asking this because you created another pull request that adds a warning about all YouTube frontends, which might be more appropriate than a specific warning just for LibreTube.
Invidious instances are now fixed. For Piped, piped.video is still working (it uses proxies under the hood) and it is recomended to use this one because there is no check wheter other instances actually disclose their source code.
This warning would say that it might not work with default instances, and that one should disable proxy and use a unbanned VPN (Proton streaming servers)
Alright that seems enough, I guess. NewPipe and FreeTube are projects that multiple are working on so they could patch it up.
LibreTube is maintained by a single Person whom I know of being a moderator in Piped. Yeah, the situation sucks. But respect would be better than furious outrage just like that.
NewPipe, Tubular, and FreeTube have never worked if your IP is blacklisted. They never fixed the issue.
Both Piped and Invidious are looking for workarounds to fix the issue, but itâs a whack-a-mole game. YouTube has even blacklisted the entire IP range of Hetzner.
The LibreTube hate is completely unjustified.
We just have a few people who donât use a VPN or just use a server that hasnât been blacklisted yet and claim that NewPipe, Tubular, and all the other solutions work, which is obvious because you shouldnât have any issues in the first place.
