Louis Rossmann unveils Grayjay - a video client similar to Revanced and NewPipe, but shows your subscriptions from various video sites in a single feed.
Site: https://grayjay.app/
Source: https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay
The app is OSS but not Free, which I’m personally completely OK with.
Watch elsewhere: Invidious / piped link in comments
If we want to be a digitally free people, we will need to pay our FOSS devs to build and maintain free platforms.
I’ll pay when I have the money, because I’m broke atm
What a great thing to witness, I hope this goes all the way and fulfil the goals that it promises to content creators and users.
So, there’s a reason why revanced has been successful and others haven’t been. Revanced is just the youtube app modded.
The others can’t reach a level of success either because they don’t work as well as the real youtube app, or because youtube will block that client just like they have done before for apps that get sucesful enough for them to notice.
I’m not sure what the end goal is for this one. If you want to make something that had video content but doesn’t have youtubes… youtube. You need to start with a new platform
From my perspective, each app has been successful in their own way - they appeal to different people for different reasons.
Revanced is just a modded YouTube - mainly appealing to people looking for YouTube premium features without the subscription.
LibreTube is the closest to Revanced, however focuses more on privacy by using a separate per-instance login system to sync user data across devices, and proxying videos through Piped instances. The proxy instances do get overloaded quite frequently as of recent, this can usually be solved by changing the instance in the settings.
NewPipe (SponsorBlock fork) takes things a bit further, with no login system whatsoever, no use of proxies, and using a custom extractor, but brings support for other streaming services such as SoundCloud, Bandcamp and some other video sites. You can do crazy things like create playlists with tracks from YouTube, Soundcloud and Bandcamp seamlessly, and listen to these in the background, without needing to provide a single login.
Grayjay appears to focus on following the creators themselves completely independent of the underlying platform, from a single app - removing the need for separate apps for each. It supports a lot of sites so far - the only ones relevant for me being Patreon, Nebula and SoundCloud. It is actually very time consuming to keep up with creators supported via these sites, without regularly opening each of the separate apps and visiting profiles directly - now they can all be under a single roof, in a single app. It seems most comparable to NewPipe so far, but you do need to log in to each site. IMO it’s going to appeal mainly to people who want to actually support creators outside of the YouTube platform.
Have you watched the video? It uses video platforms for what they’re good at: storing videos, Without limiting to only one platform and having an open source comment and subscription system on top.
YouTube can’t block this, they would have to get rid of their website and only rely on its own app to really block access.
so, they have already blocked third party apps, notably when Microsoft and when Amazon made apps, both got blocked. So no not really, they can block whoever they want.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=5DePDzfyWkw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
GrayJay looks really cool except for that it is not open source. It is unfortunate that Louis is saying it is. In case anyone reading this has a way to reach him, please send him these two links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Definitions
https://opensource.org/authority/
I watched his video and I totally understand his motivations. imo he should strongly enforce the trademark to prevent any builds he doesn’t approve of from being called GrayJay, but he should use an actual open source license which allows redistribution (albeit only under a different name, if he doesn’t approve).
If he remains determined to use a non-open-source license, he should acknowledge that that is what it is and stop claiming that it is open source.
Louis is still working on getting the video up on FUTOs channel but simply neither Louis nor Eron Wolf (Founder of Yahoo Games and former investor in WhatsApp) agree with the current definition of Open Source.
Also it is a priority for them to be the only one making money off of FUTO stuff if I remember right.
Please see my comments in this thread explaining why that is not a reasonable position, and what they should do instead (tldr: use trademark law).
I was just trying mention their stance on this, not mine. I understand your point and imagine it’ll be answered in the video.
