All publicly hosted Invidious instances are blocked from playing YouTube videos. When you try the third-party solution right now, you receive error messages with no option to bypass it.
Note: this may impact other YouTube frontends as well.
Good to know: Invidious is an open source solution to play YouTube videos on publicly or self-hosted servers. All videos played come without ads or tracking, which is the main reason for users to use the service.
A message on the official repository of the service confirms that Google has shut down the latest workaround that it still had to play YouTube videos on Invidious instances.
Sad news for everyone. YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.
Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore.
The development team is not giving up, but admits that it might take months before another workaround is found.
Users may be able to use self-hosted instances to bypass the block according to the announcement, but there is no guarantee that this is going to work in all cases.
Invididious users who want to give it a try can check out instructions here. Note that this requires a fairly good understanding of the used technologies.
This is not the first time that YouTube managed to break Invidious. The main issue now is that the makers have no workaround anymore to bypass YouTube’s blockage.
While there is a chance that they find another workaround, it looks as if Google has won the cat and mouse game for now.
Have you used Invidious in the past? If so, what do you plan to do now? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
I don’t visit YT often but when I do, I use a regular web browser and I never see ads.
You don’t need software, only knowledge.
Useless opinion.
As I said, he probably meant that you do not need scripts or extensions on his browser (“You don’t need software,”) to skip YouTube ads. There are probably many websites where you can post video shortcuts and skip ads automatically or open video in script free page because it was quickly downloaded (only knowledge). I heard about those tricks a lot (but I know only about Bing). He just needed to explain his opinion. His wording sounds arrogant.
Yes, I heard that if you copy a YouTube video link into Bing and then click on result, it will automatically skip ads. I tried it couple of times and yes there we no ads, but it is too small of the test sample and not all YouTube videos have ads.
It depends. If you want to watch YouTube on TV, you cannot rely on content blockers easily.
On some Google TVs you can sideload add free apps. They will not be as functional as the official YouTube app, but that is a tradeoff. Also, PieHole may work if you have tech knowhow and $100-$200 initial investment.
Indeed most Invidious instances are now blocked by YouTube.
Nevertheless, some Invidious instances strive to defeat YouTube blocking and manage to relay the videos, though with occasional defeats. These instances are published here :
— [https://docs.invidious.io/instances/]
— [https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/], as others, will be more successful without DASH (unchecked in its settings by default for most. As for “Proxy videos” it no longer seems to make a difference, some instances will proxy even though the setting is unchecked, some others will call Googlevideo nevertheless …)
— [https://inv.nadeko.net//] has an interesting approach as it switches to a working backend (among 3) to maximize a successful work-around. Moreover it associates itself with “Materialious, a custom YouTube frontend for Invidious” [https://materialious.nadeko.net/] which is absolutely gorgeous IMO but, again, happens to fail.
—
About YouTube’s hysterical advertisement and about Web advertisement in general, a worthy video IMO should it be only by the pertinent revolt it expresses :
“Youtube’s War on Adblock Got Worse” :
YouTube : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy7j1Pxm-mY8]
Invidious (nadeko) : [https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=vy7j1Pxm-mY8]
Materialious (nadeko) : [https://materialious.nadeko.net/watch/vy7j1Pxm-mY8]
Note that Materialious replaces /watch?v=[videoid] WITH /watch/[videoid]
—
Be noted that practically all if not all Invidious instances, if they totally or occasionally fail to deliver videos, do not fail to display YouTube channels & playlists pages nor to search for YouTube videos.
– YouTube search can also be performed with most Search engines, especially those which have a dedicated Video search.
– As for myself, I search for videos mainly from an Invidious instance and if the video retrieval is unsuccessful I’ll apply a dedicated url redirect to the YouTube embedded page of the video (no ads, no consent, displays instantaneously when embedded as well as when Iframed embedded).
—
Many thanks to all who participate to the Invidious and Piped projects.
ERRATUM, sorry :
“Youtube’s War on Adblock Got Worse” : the video’s ID is y7j1Pxm-mY8, not vy7j1Pxm-mY8 :
YouTube : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7j1Pxm-mY8]
Invidious (nadeko) : [https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=y7j1Pxm-mY8]
Materialious (nadeko) : [https://materialious.nadeko.net/watch/y7j1Pxm-mY8]
Youtube video: https://youtu.be/1BlxUC4n7c4
Swap that for https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=1BlxUC4n7c4
Still works.
Only problem here is that YT will block it again soon after which Invidious will find a way to unblock it once more. Cat and mouse story all over again.
Cat & mouse game indeed, if we can call that a game 🙂
My work-around is to open YouTube channels, playlists with Invidious (or Piped) and to open YT videos in the embedded format, which is fast, ad-free and requires no cookie (which are blocked here for Google and YouTube). The only flaw with this stratagem is that you don’t get the video’s description. To handle that, once the video is running (youtube.com/embed) I call a dedicated Invidious instance () which I’ve set with minimum requirements (no proxy, video quality = small) to ease the video retrieval (DASH is often problematic), and have its window cleaned up with a CSS to display only the video’s description, and then make it displayed as a popup over the running video … so that way I get the missing video description.
To illustrate with your video, looks like this : https://img.justpaste.me/i/20240924/st7NT/1.jpg
Of course, if invidious.nerdvpn.de is blocked then it’s a bother, but refreshing once or several times most often fixes the issue …
Anyway, I get the video 100% quality & immediately and its description with a lower reliability.
I’m not a big YouTube user, but I haven’t been seeing any YT ads using FF+uBO. For years now. Not sure why this works for me, but it does.
I tried Invidious and Piped, but always found them to be a bigger PITA and no more effective than just FF+uBO, so perhaps I’m missing the point.