Add content/post/watching-youtube-in-private.md

2025-08-06 00:33:39 +00:00 · 2022-12-10 22:55:13 -05:00
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+---
+title: "Watching YouTube in Private"
+date: 2022-12-10T21:46:55-05:00
+lastmod: 2022-12-10T21:46:55-05:00
+draft: false
+keywords: []
+description: ""
+tags: ['invidious','degoogle', 'youtube', 'yewtu.be', 'tailscale']
+categories: []
+author: ""
+
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+---
+
+<!--more-->
+
+I recently stumbled upon [yewtu.be](https://yewtu.be) and found it intriguing. It not only allows for you to watch YouTube without *being on YouTube*, but it also allows you to create an account and subscribe to channels without a Google account. I wondered what sort of wizardry was going on under the hood and discovered that it's a hosted instance of [invidious](https://invidious.io/).
+
+![requestly](/images/watching-youtube-in-private/computerphile.png)
+
+Wow, this is cool, and **JavaScript is not required**.
+
+I started to use yewtu.be as my primary client for watching videos. I subscribe to about a dozen channels and I really only want to a see list of the latest videos from my subscriptions, and not have so much of my data collected and used. A few days ago, yewtu.be went down briefly, and that motivated me enough to self-host invidious.
+
+There are several other hosted instances listed [here](https://docs.invidious.io/instances/), but being able to easily backup my own instance (along with watch history) is more compelling in my case.
+
+### Hosting invidious
+
+The quickest way to get invidious up is with docker-compose as mentioned in the [docs](https://docs.invidious.io/installation/).
+
+I made a few modifications (such as pinning the container's tag), and ended up with:
+
+```yaml
+version: "3"
+services:
+
+  invidious:
+    image: quay.io/invidious/invidious:5160d8bae39dc5cc5d51abee90571a03c08d0f2b
+    restart: unless-stopped
+    ports:
+      - "0.0.0.0:3000:3000"
+    environment:
+      INVIDIOUS_CONFIG: |
+        db:
+          dbname: invidious
+          user: kemal
+          password: kemal
+          host: invidious-db
+          port: 5432
+        check_tables: true
+    healthcheck:
+      test: wget -nv --tries=1 --spider http://127.0.0.1:3000/api/v1/comments/jNQXAC9IVRw || exit 1
+      interval: 30s
+      timeout: 5s
+      retries: 2
+    depends_on:
+      - invidious-db
+
+  invidious-db:
+    image: docker.io/library/postgres:14
+    restart: unless-stopped
+    volumes:
+      - postgresdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data
+      - ./config/sql:/config/sql
+      - ./docker/init-invidious-db.sh:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/init-invidious-db.sh
+    environment:
+      POSTGRES_DB: invidious
+      POSTGRES_USER: kemal
+      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: kemal
+    healthcheck:
+      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U $$POSTGRES_USER -d $$POSTGRES_DB"]
+
+volumes:
+  postgresdata:
+```
+
+After invidious was up and running, I installed [Tailscale](https://tailscale.com/) on it to leverage its MagicDNS, and I'm now able to access this instance from anywhere at [http://invidious:3000/feed/subscriptions](http://invidious:3000/feed/subscriptions).
+
+### Redirecting YouTube links
+
+I figured it would be nice to redirect existing YouTube links that others send me, so that I could seamlessly watch the videos using invidious.
+
+Without subjecting my entire household to this, I went looking for a way to redirect paths at the browser level. I found the lightweight proxy [requestly](https://requestly.io/), which can be used to modify http requests in my browser. I created the following rules:
+
+![requestly](/images/watching-youtube-in-private/requestly-rules.png)
+
+Now the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lz30by8-sU will redirect to [http://invidious:3000/watch?v=-lz30by8-sU](http://invidious:3000/watch?v=-lz30by8-sU)
+
+I'm still looking for ways to improve this invidious setup. There doesn't appear to be a way to stream in 4K yet.