alt Hacker NewsYouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other Browsers
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Revanced allows you to patch the official Android YouTube apk to enable this feature alongside many others, including a block, Sponsorblock, and dislikes.
https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager
Rossmann's Grayjay app offers the same functionality in a separate standalone client. It has a paid pro mode, but is free software. I use this on devices that I haven't signed in with Google.
Newpipe remains one of the best solutions for background playback. They do tend to move pretty quickly to patch "fixes" that YouTube throw in now and again. It's also useful for video backups if you need to preserve them for any reason.
Background playback is a feature of the browser and operating system, not YouTube.
Consumer laws should prevent Google doing this. We need an anti-DMCA to make circumvention, bypassing, or disabling of user’s device or OS features illegal.
i had that happen on firefox mobile months ago and installed video background play fix which all it does is stop sending the js hooks for when tab/window focus is lost. it was something clearly targeted to mobile browsers for people like me who don't bother with official apps anymore as they're riddled with antipatterns and ads. you can just youtube to the homepage like it's an app anyway.
This will be a positive if browsers (extensions?) allow the ability to spoof visibility by site. Most websites have no business knowing if they're in the foreground or background.
If this may help you, some browser allow youtube videos in PIP (e.g. Orion). That keeps the video going, you can scale it down in a corner.
Otherwise the other option is to drag the tab out to a window of its own, they can't know it's not visible, at least that works for Twitch ads.
There must be reaching a state where there must have more code for blocking all the stuffs there are trying to block than displaying videos. No wonder its UI feels bloated.
This is so annoying.
Along the same line is that you can watch any hour long video without interruptions unless it is music where you will get interrupted every couple of minutes with "are you there?" dialogues.
On iOS you can get free background play with Youtube App by putting the video in picture-in-picture -> locking the screen, -> going to control center and hitting the play button. Don’t let Google know!
I'm confused. Wouldn't Brave just stop telling YouTube if it's in the background or not?
It should be trivial to work around; for instance, yt-dlp or so (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) and I think you can as-is stream e. g. via mpv or something, probably to the browser too. Some python script for an ad-hoc localhost webserver I'd think.
What is much more worrying is how aggressively Google tries to abuse its de-facto monopoly. I have said it before, I will say it again: Google abusing everyone else is a bad situation. We need to make Google smaller again.
If you’re on iOS, put the video on full screen and then put Safari in the background. Next, press play in the Control Center. This should now allow the audio to play in the background.
What a shame. What's the point even? I'm not going subscribe to YouTube premium anyway, and even less install and use the YouTube app. What happens with this move is just that I will just use YouTube less. I believe that's the case for most people who chose to use YouTube in a browser precisely for background playback.
As an example: knowing that I won't be able to keep the sound playing for the 5 minutes in between two buses when I need to walk and pay attention, I'll probably just launch a podcast from the beginning of my hour of transportation so that I'm not interrupted. For these five minutes, they loose me for almost an hour.
Still working on IronFox (Firefox fork) on Android with the Video Background Fix extension.
Will someone _please_ make a decent linux phone already so we can stop this nonsense.
Fuck google
I've noticed yesterday before and after update. So annoying. I so fucking hate Google and what they've become.
This is precisely why I don’t use YT anymore. On top of these scummy behaviour on Alphabets part… the content has taken a deep dive because more and more people are creating it for the “algorithm” and less for the content.
Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades and attempt to paywall it as ‘Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members.’
Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information.
Fuck you google.
What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the experience for your userbase in order to blackmail them into paying you, and giving them back what they had in the first place.
At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.