With the recent blocking measures from Google using this extension has become quite painful. It doesn't work in what feels like 75% of all cases, and I feel like the situation is causing instance admins to shut their servers down, because it's just not fun. While this is the case, I'd still like to use Youtube anonymously as much as possible. If that's not possible, I usually still want to watch a specific video that I'm already requesting.
The "redirect to original" feature works only if the URL still contains all the relevant bits to reconstruct the original URL. This is unfortunately not always the case; sometimes when opening a video URL an Invidious instance redirects me to the start page, sometimes I get redirect to the "pick another instance" page. The process for me commonly looks like this:
Open Youtube video
Get redirected to instance picker; "go to original" does not work here, neither does "switch instance"
Open Youtube video again
Watch youtube video, or, in most cases, get greeted with another error while streaming (although landing on 2. again is possible, of course)
Pick redirect to original
I'd like to propose a feature where you can be optionally automatically redirected to the original if a chosen instance does not work. Another, maybe related feature, is to automatically penalize instances that have been shown not to work repeatedly. I understand that "the instance does not work" is not very clearly defined, and there are many different failure modes, but maybe simple checks associated with different URL patterns (like "watch?v=… should contain a video") would already help a lot. Ideally this would reduce the above process to two steps usually.
A variation of this that may also be interesting is "Automatically try N other instances".
I also understand that such an automatic redirect may not be in the interest of very privacy conscious users. As said above I personally would like to use alternative frontends as much as possible, but am primarily interested in the videos I request. This is why I think such a feature would have to be opt-in, and clearly labelled as such.
With the recent blocking measures from Google using this extension has become quite painful. It doesn't work in what feels like 75% of all cases, and I feel like the situation is causing instance admins to shut their servers down, because it's just not fun. While this is the case, I'd still like to use Youtube anonymously as much as possible. If that's not possible, I usually still want to watch a specific video that I'm already requesting.
The "redirect to original" feature works only if the URL still contains all the relevant bits to reconstruct the original URL. This is unfortunately not always the case; sometimes when opening a video URL an Invidious instance redirects me to the start page, sometimes I get redirect to the "pick another instance" page. The process for me commonly looks like this:
I'd like to propose a feature where you can be optionally automatically redirected to the original if a chosen instance does not work. Another, maybe related feature, is to automatically penalize instances that have been shown not to work repeatedly. I understand that "the instance does not work" is not very clearly defined, and there are many different failure modes, but maybe simple checks associated with different URL patterns (like "
watch?v=…should contain a video") would already help a lot. Ideally this would reduce the above process to two steps usually.A variation of this that may also be interesting is "Automatically try N other instances".
I also understand that such an automatic redirect may not be in the interest of very privacy conscious users. As said above I personally would like to use alternative frontends as much as possible, but am primarily interested in the videos I request. This is why I think such a feature would have to be opt-in, and clearly labelled as such.