FreeTube not reliable. Subscription updates are missing

[felixsanz]

Funny... i've opened newpipe and there is a lot of videos that FreeTube never showed up, so i don't even know what i missed.

Plus, sometimes you update FreeTube subscriptions and some videos appear, but you update tomorrow and some old videos appear in between those.

Looks like subscriptions updates are totally broken and not reliable

[PrestonN]

I imagine it's related to this issue on the Invidious side. There won't be anything I can do with the live release as this issue needs to be fixed on the Invidious side.

Having said that, I'm hard at work with the rewrite and loading channel data still works fine over there. Subscriptions have not been implemented yet however so it's obviously missing a few things. This issue will only be fixed when Invidious is fixed or when the rewrite is finished.

[felixsanz]

youtube subscriptions are just rss feeds, why not parse them with a library and stop depending on dead projects?

[PrestonN]

Because the project wasn't being shut down when I originally implemented it.

RSS feeds also don't provide all of the information that users expect so we have to get video information from the channels page.

The rewrite will provide the option to get feed information from RSS feeds though. The current code base is very poorly put together so I'm redoing a lot of the functionality that's in the live release. It'll take some time but the end result will be a much better kept application and I think the wait will be worth it.

Builds of the rewrite are already available to download and can be tested while the development is progressing. If you'd like to fix some of these problems (while also being aware that some functionality is missing) then I welcome you to give the rewrite a try and provide feedback.

[razzor1984]

Hello @PrestonN,
is 7.3 a build with parts of a rewrite ? Where can i download your latest stuff as described in the last post. I would try to test it ;)

[PrestonN]

The current v0.7.3 release has absolutely no work done from the rewrite. The repository where the rewrite has been living up to this point is over here.

If you go over to the Actions tab, here you will find automated builds of the rewrite that are available to test out. Please be aware that many features are missing compared to the live release and anything in the rewrite is subject to change. Anyone is more than welcome to give the rewrite a try and provide feedback over at the respective repository.

[alidan]

I'm here from running into an issue with some channels where they never get videos, i'm assuming that things are related.

With that said, is there any reason you can go to youtube directly, get and cache the info for subs (depending on the sub count, this may be alot, but also working with a program that I dumped 4 million+ images into that made 200x200 thumbs for everything, it's also not a lot at the same time) and then when you refresh the subs, it just checks the channels. Possibly with the rss feed, using that as a trigger to look at the channel and see what's up?

I use another program called tartube that is more or less a front end for youtube-dl, whatever it does, it seems to get the full info from videos I ask it to grab.

it may be possible to ask them? also, at least for any broken channel, it may be possible to pull from searches

I don't know how efficient or worth while this may be, but it could work.

[lbriais]

I have the same issue as OP
But the point is I tested my issue with the new flavour of Freetube and I got exactly the same issue...

I often watch the Andertons channel. They provide new videos almost everyday... For months now Freetube is not able to show any of their videos, be it as subscription or even directly going to the channel page (although the videos themselves are shown as result of a direct search).

Hearing about the refactor project of Freetube, I tried with the new flavour of Freetube with the exact same result !! No video is shown !

All captures here are done with the new flavour of Freetube, but it could have been done with the "old" one... It would give the exact same result...

Result of a direct search:

Going to the channel shows an empty page (hitting "fetching more results" changes nothing) !

This happens in both Freetube and Freetube-vue... AFAIK, there were supposed to have a very different way to get information from youtube, at least we could say it's consistent...

[PrestonN]

If you're getting the exact same result, that means you're still using the Invidious API over in the rewrite. I just tested the local API with the exact channel you mentioned and I'm not experiencing any issues.

Because this issue is because of the Invidious API, I'm closing this here. If you want to get updates on when this issue will be fixed (It likely isn't going to be fixed anytime soon just an FYI), you can track the progress over here.

[lbriais]

Humm... You're saying I'm using the invidious API but that's not what the config says...

The end of the invidio.us instance was actually the reason why I checked the new rewrite of Freetube....

@PrestonN is there any specific branch I should use (was on master) ?

[alidan]

where do you get this preferred api backend option?

[lbriais]

This is actually a screen capture using the new flavour of Freetube which is supposed not to use invidious as backend (which seems to be confirmed by the config flag in the screen capture).

I agree that if there is an issue with this, this is probably a bug to be reported in the relevant project (ie FreeTube-Vue), but before doing so, I just wanted a confirmation from @PrestonN that I was doing things correctly (maybe a specific branch in that other project works as expected and I've been using the master branch for my tests).

[PrestonN]

@lbriais Can you confirm that you're on the latest iteration of the rewrite? Judging by your screenshot, you're using a very old version where there wasn't a way to gather channel information using the local API. This means that your app would use Invidious regardless of your settings. Please try again with the latest version and let me know if you're still experiencing problems.

[lbriais]

Indeed I was way behind the head... :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Although I have been doing a git pull, I didn't notice that the package.json which had been modified by a previous npm install had been preventing the git pull to complete...

I've just removed the offending file, git pulled again, npm installed and now everything is fine... I see the new version working :+1: .

Sorry for the useless noise... long live to the local API.

[alidan]

welp, looks like there is no easy way for me to install the new one to use, so ill ask, any idea when a version for that will be made to install? and if that's the version thats getting worked on, may as well move my feature request over there as well.