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Everyone knows that YouTube is a hot mess when it comes to privacy, and I finally got fed up with having to shell out my hard earned money for YouTube Premium. It wasn’t too dificult to find a reasonable solution for my Fedora system… just pop into Gnome Software and install Pipeline. Problem solved there… no tracking, and I only had to deal with the occasional sponsor message in a video. I’ve also got UBlock Origin, Sponsor Block and Dearrow installed in Fire Fox, so things are solved there too. The problem was my iPhone, and how to work around the ads in YouTube there. Thankfully, a little research lled me to an app/server called Yattee. I found a few guides in their documentation about how to install it (it assumes Docker, but I have Podman on my Fedora system and had to modify some instructions slightly to take SELinux into account), and I successfully got it set up. I did have to connect Yattee to an Invidious instance, but that’s quite straightforward to do. Finally, I used Tailscale Serve to create a reverse HTTPS proxy in front of the Yattee server hosted via the Podman instance so I could access the server from the client app on my iPhone regardless of wherever I happen to be. I’ve tested it out, and despite the client being a beta (v2.x) and the server being fairly new as well, it allows me to enjoy YouTube videos without Google’s privacy-invasive BS. Two final notes: 1. The server isn’t exposed to the public internet, and is only available over my tailnet. 2. I use a public Invidious instance, but the integration isn’t for the actual retrieval of videos (that’s handled by the Yattee server, which is YT-DLP based), it’s more for search and metadata retrieval. Maybe not a perfect solution, but it does the job I want it to do.

Nice work! I love watching people give google/meta/microsoft etc the finger!

Checkout

https://headscale.net/stable/

My approach is a python app that’s literally just a button I press after I copy a YT URL from FreeTube. I click the button and it gets yt-dlp to download the video in the highest quality into my Jellyfin folder so I can watch it on my Apple TV.

I did start looking into TubeSync, but I wasn’t all that familiar with Docker at the time, so got quite lost with it. In the end I quite like browsing FreeTube, and only downloading the stuff that catches my interest. Means I don’t spend ages idly scrolling a feed.

I was having a discussion with a friend of mine from a more conservative part of the country and I happen to mention my set up involving YouTube. The reaction I got from the friend was negative to say the least. He outright accuse me of stealing money from the hands of creator on YouTube by blocking ads and tracking from Google. Am I a little upset at him? Yes, but not enough to end the friendship over something like this.

So I’ve dabbled on and off with Tailscale for a while and have pretty much all my services besides my video players behind it. Was part of a big efficiency push I did earlier in the year which was a giant pain in the ass so I’m kinda taking a step back for a few weeks and enjoy the fruits of my work and also catch up on all the things I forget to do when I hyper fixate on my lab.

My question is how much of a pain in the ass will it be to move from tail to head

My current setup isn’t available outside my house so I was planning on hosting something like WireGuard. What’s the advantage of Headscale over a more traditional VPN?

It’s a mesh for wireguard with DERP and MagicDNS so you can segment traffic, do availability groups, point to point all from the same service.

Read through the repo, but I have deployed this to a VPS and I am really happy with it

https://github.com/meerzulee/headscale-setup

It packages headplane which is similar to crossplane and has a pretty intuitive webgui. Just make sure it’s well secured, https, reverseproxy yadda yadda

Neither wireguard nor headscale nor tailscale will work through a cloudflsre tunnel and the wireguard/headscale server cannot be behind a CDN DNS proxy

You just point your tailscale clients to a headscale VPS. Cannot run a CDN proxy to the domain name. Also you get headplane and other goodies.

Read through the repo, but I have deployed this to a VPS and I am really happy with it

https://github.com/meerzulee/headscale-setup

Oh forsooth! Those poor billionaires!!!

Is that a wrapper for https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/README.md ?

Pretty much.

It reads the clipboard, adds the URL to a yt-dlp script, downloads the video, then switches to my YouTube Jellyfin folder and copies the download across. But instead of opening a terminal in that folder and copy/pasting the script from a .txt file I used to use, it’s just one click. Three if you count clicking the share button in Freetube and then clicking the ‘copy link’ button.

Does he have a favorite flavor of boot polish?

I use newpipe, I wish they would add invidious support to the app 🥺

I used to use Yattee + Piped and it was great, until Piped stopped working on iOS devices (I tried all the fixes I found, none seems to work). And I just switched to Yattee + Invidious but it seems to be limited to 360p for me (whereas Invidious works normally elsewhere). But it’s the first time I hear about Yattee-server. What’s the point of it? What does it add to Yattee + Invidious?

….that’d be a helluva browser extension

Huh, hadn’t thought of that.

https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext

If you’re so inclined, that’s mozilla native but it’ll port to most browsers. You can install local for dev and test before you sign and push to the official addons repo at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/

Mostly posting this as a note to myself and anyone else interested

Yattee Server is just a YT-DLP based back end for Yattee 2.0 (which is currently only available via TestFlight). Yattee 1.0 was actually pulled by the dev from the App Store because it was out of date and broken. Being blind, I can’t tell you the resolution that videos play in, but at least for me they play smoothly with some rare stuttering. From what I can tell, setting things to proxy the videos Directly through Yattee Server leads to a temporary download that lasts for 24 hours, but the playback is slow to start due to the requirement of the download needing to occur first. Once it does play, then the experience is as I described earlier.

Well, this explains that, I’m stuck with Yattee 1.0, which seems to work for me, or at least has the same bugs as Invidious/Piped.