Adding #YouTube videos to #Piped playlists seems to be broken now (or at least it only works sometimes).
It seems that even videos metadata (besides the actual media) now can’t be fetched via the YouTube API if YouTube decides for whatever reason to throttle your IP.
Which means that the youtube
integration in #Platypush will probably have to implement its own backend to save playlists and subscriptions instead of piggybacking on Piped.
Switching the backend to #Invidious probably won’t help either, as most of the Invidious instances are now broken too.
At this point it almost looks like #Google is going down with its aggressive policy against 3rd-party YouTube clients to the point that they’re ok to even break their own APIs.
The only working solutions that I currently have to watch YouTube videos without going through their app/site are:
Platypush’ YouTube integration paired with a media plugin (like vlc, mpv or gstreamer) or Kodi/a Chromecast-compatible device. Platypush under the hood uses yt-dlp to do the magic, so if you run a Platypush instance in your home network your IP will still be visible to Google, but it’s still better than the alternative (watch endless ads or access their app/site while logged in with your Google account). Support for user playlists and subscriptions is currently buggy though, since it relies on the Piped API, and basically all Piped instances are currently broken.
Firefox’ Open With extension paired with #mpv, which comes with native yt-dlp support. That extension is unmaintained, and it doesn’t support ways to automatically open URLs with an external app (you have to explicitly open the URL with the extension), but so far it’s the only extension that I’ve managed to get to work with an external player - I haven’t had much luck with the External Application Launcher yet, which in theory should also support auto-opening specific URLs with the external app rather than the browser.
No solutions on mobile yet, but I’m working on empowering the streaming capabilities in Platypush so a “Play in browser” option for YouTube videos can be a thing.