Freetube is the best way to watch YouTube

Freetube: Take control of YouTube and refuse to be distracted! YouTube is designed to allow you to watch videos as long as possible, and while Freetube cannot cure your "YouTube addiction", it can help you better control the viewing experience.

This app gives you complete control over the content displayed on the screen. Don't like comments? Just close it. Don't want to watch the recommended video or automatically play the next video? No problem, it can be disabled. You can replace those eye-catching thumbnails with more general thumbnails, convert all capital titles to title case, and in short, it can turn YouTube from a trap that attracts your attention into a tool for finding and watching videos.

Freetube also has privacy protection advantages. Your viewing history is stored only on your computer, not on YouTube's servers. It allows you to regain control of your video viewing habits.

No tracking, ad-free viewing experience

Simply download and install Freetube to get started (currently only supports Windows, Mac and Linux systems). Once installed, you can start browsing and watching videos immediately.

You can visit popular video pages or directly search for what you want. I found that Freetube's search results load faster than web versions of YouTube.

Freetube plays YouTube videos via Invidious, an open source, decentralized YouTube front-end. Watching videos with Invidious means that Google cannot track your viewing history—that is, your viewing history is private. Many people around the world are hosting Invidious servers—you can open public lists of these servers directly in a web browser. What's unique about Freetube is that it will randomly use different instances each time it runs. This is an easy way to use this technique.

But you don't have to think about these technical details at all - you can use YouTube as usual. Search, browse and enjoy videos. Next, the real fun part.

Custom Freetube

You can find the settings for Freetube in the toolbar on the left. Here you can choose the default start page, such as subscriptions, channel lists, trends, and history. You can choose how the video is presented and replace those eye-catching custom thumbnails with random frames in the video.

Continue scrolling down and you will find the option to play videos in an external player (such as VLC). But please pay special attention to the "No Interference Settings" section.

Here you can disable any user interface elements that may cause you to be distracted. For example, you can hide popular video sections, comments, and recommended videos.

There are also some features at the bottom that automatically skip certain parts of the video, such as the opening credits or sponsored clips. It even supports DeArrow, allowing you to replace eye-catching thumbnails with random frames in your video and convert all capital titles to title case.

Basically, you have complete control over what you see. If you like to adjust settings, Freetube is exactly the app you need.

How to import your YouTube subscription to Freetube

It is important to note that you cannot log into your YouTube account on Freetube, so you cannot import your subscription directly (but if you don't want to start from scratch, you can follow the steps below to import your subscription). First, click here to open the "Your YouTube Data" tool. Click "More" in the first box, and then click "Download Data". Choose how you want to receive data – I recommend the email option – and wait.

After receiving the ZIP file, find the files Takeout/YouTube and YouTube Music/subscriptions/subscriptions.csv. Then, in Freetube's settings, find the "Import Subscription" option. Point it to the file you just found and it's done - all your YouTube subscriptions are now on Freetube.

You can also import your viewing history at the same time if you want: it is located in the files Takeout/YouTube and YouTube Music/history/watch-history.json in the same folder, and the function of importing history is also provided in the settings. .

After completing these and configuring them to your preferences, you should feel at home in Freetube. Enjoy watching videos without being tracked by Google without being tracked down by Google.

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