I self-host invidious but in the last few months it has been struggling (slow buffering, often doesn't load saying media not recognized, etc, which I understand is YT being actively hostile). Any better options, or am I "holding it wrong"?
YouTube has been really cracking down on alt clients and YouTube downloaders lately I think.
I don’t even use one, and I see “you must log in to view this video” on videos shockingly frequently if I’m not logged in. Not even age restricted videos, they give that on any video at random now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if soon it will require an account to watch at all, and they will just get to ban any accounts that use Adblock or download anything.
YouTube currently bans every IP address with a lot of guest traffic. They have also banned all datacenter IP ranges.
Sometimes a "poToken" (a magic string that's used to 'validate' a client to prove that it's an official client) can be used to bypass this, but most of the time it's easier to just sign in with a Google account (which is also dangerous because YouTube has been banning accounts with unusual activity since last year[0])
Nowadays, most third party clients either use a browser/WebView to generate a poToken[1], or directly require a user to enter it for downloading[2]
I feel like the parent commenters issue is related to this, and it looks like there's an ongoing PR to implement support for it[3] (Invidious already had supported poTokens, hovewer their implementation were setting a single token in the config, and AFAIK that method doesn't work anymore)
