“What?”, you exclaim. “A new update? And it’s not even a hotfix? But we had the last update just a few days ago!”

Well, deal with it. B)

(For the millenials, B) is the cool sunglasses emoji that your parents used in the pre-Unicode era.)

Don’t get used to it, though. This is still a volunteer project being done in everyone’s free time.

This indeed isn’t a hotfix. And it isn’t even a minor update! We actually bring you another main user-facing feature: content metadata! Now you can view more information about a video in the Description tab, such as its category, tags, license and so on. If that is not enough for you, the broken like count for YouTube comments has been fixed. Moreover, the channel description doesn’t lose words between the first and second line anymore. Read on to find out more details. Eh? Eh? Anyone? No? Okay. (Tough crowd.)

New

• @Stypox is back with a bang! You can now view a video’s metadata in the Description tab. For example, the video’s license, category, tags, privacy, age limit (if it applies) and the thumbnail URL. Tags are also tappable, so tapping one opens up a search with that tag.

• Continuing their previous work, @mhmdanas added the “Show channel details” option to remote playlists as well.

• @TiA4f8R added the option to open channels or videos in the browser via the long-press menu.

Fixed

• Fetching likes for YouTube comments was broken, so the like count was always zero. @litetex fixed this so you can see the correct like count again.

• @sauravrao637 limited the “Preferred ‘Open’ action” setting to work on shared video links only, and not for channel and playlist links. Thanks to @SameenAhnaf for noticing this major gotcha.

• @TobiGr fixed the text on blank tabs to be centre-aligned if it runs into multiple lines.

• @Imericxu added automatic removal of rich text formatting when pasting any text into the search field. Them HTML tags ain’t gonna be rendered no more. Get outta here with your markup.

• @sauravrao637 added error handling to the function which fetches stream sizes in the Download dialog. Without it, an error when fetching could potentially crash the app. With it, you will just see a harmless little snackbar, should you ever encounter such an error.

• @sauravrao637 also fixed channel descriptions in search results truncating words between the first line and the second, which probably led to some users being confused and questioning their grammar knowledge.

• If you were to rotate the app on a page that showed the “Video not available” error, it would cause a crash, which has been fixed by @evermind-zz. The same crash occurred when you rotated the device while the video page was still loading.

• @XiangRongLin changed the behaviour of saving the import/export database path to only do so when an import/export successfully takes place. Also, when importing a backup, the path is committed immediately because the app is just about to be restarted.

• If you changed playback speed from the Play Queue page, it wouldn’t reflect in the UI until you paused or scrubbed through the stream. @TobiGr fixed it so that the speed is updated immediately.

• @TiA4f8R fixed the “Play with Kodi” button inside the player. It prompted the user to install Kore even if it was already installed. Now it works correctly, just like the buttons on the video page and the long-press menu.

• @fynngodau fixed the Bandcamp app intent filter so that it doesn’t accept invalid URLs, including a fix from @yashpalgoyal1304.

• @Douile found and fixed a bug that’s a little complicated to trigger. You open a video with chapters, enqueue another video, open the queue menu, and finally open the chapter menu. This would add the queue progress timer from the queue menu to the chapter menu as well, with the timer stuck. Well, it’s gone now. And maybe avoid such complicated steps in the future.

Nerd Talk

• @litetex updated the Java distribution for GitHub Actions to version 2. If you’re experiencing deja vu upon reading this, that’s because this same update was done by TacoTheDank for the NewPipe repo. litetex has done this update however for the NewPipeExtractor repo. They also changed (for both the Extractor repo and the NewPipe repo) the Java distribution of GitHub CI from the default Zulu to Adopt, which is unbranded and more likely to be maintained than the free version of Zulu.

• @XiangRongLin fixed a failing test for YouTube Covid-19 metadata, as well as one for PeerTube account extraction.

• @TobiGr updated the JUnit unit testing framework from version 4.13.1 to 4.13.2, both for the Extractor repo and the NewPipe repo. This is gonna make NewPipe 5x faste– no it won’t. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

• @TiA4f8R specified UTF-8 file encoding in a couple of test-related files, because Windows likes to use non-standard file encodings (“Haha! Look at my market share and weep!”), while the GitHub Actions CI runs on a Linux-based OS.

• @TobiGr changed a URL-related error message to be more accurate.

• @Stypox added a neat utility function to replace several repeating lines of code with a single function call.

• @Imericxu refactored the PlayQueue class and added unit tests for it. Testing is important. Please visit the Aperture Science Enrichment Center to test to your heart’s content (and then test some more).

• @TobiGr updated the core Android JDK desugaring library from version 1.1.1 to 1.1.5.

• @mhmdanas bumped the PrettyTime library version from 5.0.0 to 5.0.1. This update brings support for the Somali language and fixes an error in the Romanian time translations.

• @TobiGr fixed some more Android Studio warnings.

Where to get this brand-new version

NewPipe notifies you about new versions. You can download them when you press the notification, which will take you to the GitHub Releases page.

If you use the F-Droid app, it, too, notifies you about updates for NewPipe. Please keep in mind that it can take F-Droid a while to update their repository. If you have problems installing the update, you may need to uninstall NewPipe and then install it afresh. (Make sure to backup data by exporting your database from the Settings > Content menu.)

If you already installed NewPipe from F-Droid’s repository, to get this version of NewPipe you can do one of the following:

• Wait for them to update
• Switch to NewPipe’s custom repository by following the directions in the announcement post

Note: If you installed NewPipe from GitHub Releases you will not have to uninstall NewPipe to switch to our custom repo. Just let it update your current version. Make sure you back up your data as mentioned in the warning at the top of the FAQ page!

Now that you’ve (hopefully) updated, please let us know what your experience of the latest release is, especially bugs in need of fixing. As usual, you can reach out to us via IRC (#newpipe on Libera.Chat), open issues on GitHub or, ideally, use our built-in crash reporter to send us machine-readable issue reports. You can even send in fixes yourself.

If you have any other questions, feel free to post them in the comments here and someone will reply to you. Also, thanks for reading it till the end! We put quite some time into these blog posts.