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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
comments: true
tags:
[
"invidious",
"youtube",
"yewtu.be",
"tailscale",
"privacy",
"self-hosted",
]
author: "Dave Gallant"
---
I recently stumbled upon [yewtu.be](https://yewtu.be) and found it intriguing. It not only allows 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. What sort of wizardry is going on under the hood? It turns out that it's a hosted instance of [invidious](https://invidious.io/).
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![image](computerphile.png)
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I started using [yewtu.be](https://yewtu.be) as my primary client for watching videos. I subscribe to several YouTube channels and I prefer the interface invidiuous provides due to its simplicity. It's also nice to be in control of my search and watch history.
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 (including subscriptions and 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, and ended up with:
```yaml
version: "3"
services:
invidious:
image: quay.io/invidious/invidious
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.
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](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.