I love the idea of a privacy-focused fronend for YouTube, but every time I visit a piped link, it just spins forever. Both on my Linux desktop and my Android phone.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong?
Here is the latest one I tried and failed to load.
Temporary outages are likely the result of the server being unable to handle the load. If youtube changed their system it would take a while for a fix.
Piped is web software anyone can host. Like Lemmy, everyone piles into the biggest instance with most memorable / searchale name, thus overloading it.
It's a cat and mouse game with Google. Sometimes Piped works, other times it loads only the first minute of the video before hanging forever, and sometimes it doesn't load at all. Often YouTube makes an updates that breaks it altogether until someone fixes it.
I've had the most luck with NewPipe but unfortunately it's only a mobile app, not a website. Works great though.
I used to use NewPipe, but there's a new mobile app on the block from FUTO called Grayjay. You really should check it out, it's even more flexible and also loads and runs faster than NewPipe.
I run my own Piped server, works great and have a few friends that use it exclusively now because the YT algo was getting too be too much for them, besides the ads.
I think the public ones are just hammered too hard.
No, I gave up on linking via Piped. At this point I figure people willing to go to the trouble of using alternative frontends already have a favorite (that's probably not piped) and the Privacy Redirect extension and are good to just get the yt link.
I'm not looking to self host anything or switch frontends. I just wish I could watch videos when people post Piped links without the extra hassle of navigating Piped's interface enough to get the raw Youtube url. I suppose if there's a public Invidious instance that actually works and everybody on Lemmy posting links to Piped switches to that public Invidious instance, that would wolve my issue, but I suspect Invidioue may not actually be any more reliable.
That video loaded fine for me just now. I have had similar issues though when I need to refresh a page once or twice to get it to load/play the video. It’s either hit and miss or maybe an issue when I load the page initially.
Yes, but I have noticed you have to wait for that spin for quite some time. I have not looked at its architecture at all, but it made me assume it was doing some intermediary caching or some such. I wonder if this is the same for videos that have been watched already at your local CDN assuming it is doing something interesting with edge delivery.
Have just started to check it out, so I’m clueless but it has worked pretty well so far.