Support for the Invidious API

[okh-mzny]

With the quickly ratelimited pre-shipped API and the tedious way of getting your own key (that may or may not stop working aswell due to google constantly screwing with their APIs) and even the fact that one has to create a google account to use the API, I think the software is pretty much in disrepair for a lot of people, and especially those who would like to live an ungoogled life as much as possible. That's why I think that adding support for the Invidious API would greatly improve things for everyone.

If you're not aware, Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious) is "an alternative front-end to YouTube" to quote the Github page. It scrapes and parses the YouTube webpage and makes the video, (unprofiled) recommendations, comments, and everything else available in a lightweight frontend. Invidious brings its own API that returns data from video pages it parses: (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/API).

Here's the pros from my point of view:

• ungoogled, you will not need to create an account to use the official API anymore.
• unlimited and transparent, no need to deal with ratelimiting from Google, since one can host their own API.
• private, while Google can easily link your YouTube API activity to your account, Invidious does not keep any server-side session data or cookies.

Unfortunately this solution would not be perfect though, cons:

• I have commonly seen "Error 429: Too many requests" while working with repeated youtube webpage queries on a VPS or similar, one can still host at home or use a publicly available Invidious instance, but those might still not be options for everyone.
• I honestly haven't looked much into wether there is a difference with age gated videos on the YouTube API vs. Invidious. Last time I checked, Invidious loaded age restricted videos just fine, but I know it recently broke in youtube-dl, so that might be something we'll have to live with breaking.

With all things said, I hope this will be considered in the future.

[cjkr]

Great idea. I hope it is implemented soon; something like straw-viewer to youtube-viewer.