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.
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?
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 Yattee 1.0 was actually pulled by the dev from the App Store because it was out of date and broken.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.