Customize YouTube to work exactly the way you want it to.

I’m not sure it’s the “best” way, but it’s a solid alternative, and receives rapid updates when YouTube moves to break things.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/15571129

I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.

And the best part is no ads whatsoever.

  • Nougat
    36•3 months ago

    Other benefits:

    • Multiple subscription profiles, so you can organize your subscribed channels into groups. “I want to watch stuff about cars and motorcycles - I choose ‘Motoring.’”
    • SponsorBlock
    • No stupid recommendations to drag you into despair, hate watching, and misinformation.
    • Ability to never show shorts.

    Downside:

    • Max 1080
    • Fonzie!English
      10•3 months ago

      Seeing how I invested in an 144Hz monitor instead of a Hi-Res one, I see no issues here!

      Will check it out!

      • @[email protected]English
        2•3 months ago

        I still don’t think that I’ve ever seen a 4k image or video. plenty of morons out there sliding the quality up to 4k and going “Look at how good it looks!” whole I know full well their screen is at 1080 and I internally cringe.

        But yeah, late 2024 and I’ve still never even seen a 4k screen to my knowledge.

        At least not in person and not rebroadcast to a 1080 TV. So it doesn’t count.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•3 months ago

          I still don’t think that I’ve ever seen a 4k image or video

          Have you not watched a recent movie? Modern midrange to high-end TVs have been 4K for a while (eg my 2019 LG OLED is 4K) and it’s pretty common for movies to be released on 4K Blu-ray.

          Good 4K looks great. Not the low-bitrate streams from services like Netflix, but the 60Mbps+ streams from Blu-ray remuxes (for example, via Real Debrid or downloaded via usenet) or from Blu-ray disks themselves.

          You’ve definitely seen a 4K image. It’s equivalent to 8.3 megapixels, and good cameras have supported at least that resolution for a long time. Even the nearly 15-year-old Samsung Galaxy S2 had an 8MP camera.

          • @[email protected]English
            4•3 months ago

            I don’t think you understand what seeing a 4k image or video means. You can’t see a 4k image or video without a 4k screen. Maybe a 15 year old camera can capture it, but you can’t see it, even with today’s phone screens.

            The only TV I’ve ever owned was like 19". The only real-size TVs I’ve ever watched are my parents’ and the one my roommate had in the living room.

            And just because they’ve been available since 2019 (according to you- I honestly can’t remember when they started showing up lol) doesn’t mean they were common or cheap at the time. And both of those units (the ones I’ve spent any time with) were bought around 2016 anyway. Not sure what world you live in where everybody buys a new TV every 3 or 4 years, but it’s not a universal thing, or even the norm. Where having an SDTV might justify a midnight trip to go get a real TV, the need for 4k is less than 0.

            So no, I am quite sure I’ve never seen a 4k image or video. Because I’ve never owned it has access to a 4k screen. That in and of itself is enough to verify that much, without having to worry about how modern it is, it what it was shot with, or recorded on, or how it was downloaded, or where/how it was streamed or any of that confusion.

            No 4k screen means I’ve never seen anything that could only be on one.

          • Fonzie!English
            1•3 months ago

            Also, sidenote, 8.3MP camera does not mean the outputted image is that large.

            I know someone with a smartphone with 108MP single camera, it has a bad lens but compresses the capture into a sharper 2k picture. Most digital (phone) cameras work this way.

            But yeah, you don’t see 4k image unless your screen is 4k, as they said.

        • Fonzie!English
          1•3 months ago

          Sometimes the compression is not great, and 4k compressed on the fly might look visibly sharper then whatever 1080p version they offer. I’ve noticed this with YouTube videos sometimes.

          That said, I’ve seen too many tech illiterate people go for 4k video not realising they also need a 4k screen. Or complaining their 4k console doesn’t look 4k, not realising the game also needs to output it

    • @[email protected]English
      6•3 months ago

      You can add mpv to FreeTube as an external player. With yt-dlp, it supports playing YouTube videos directly and in any quality. It also has a plugin for SponsorBlock integration.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•3 months ago

        Yeah, I use MPV as a external player and it’s great because you can highly customize the way you watch videos. I like equalize the sound and through a MPV script I save the video from cache with a keystroke if I liked it. Sadly watching with subtitles stopped working some weeks ago.