Hey look! We were only lagging a couple months behind the app this time, not a whole release cycle! That’s progress! Look at us! :D

Welcome, everyone, to our brand new style of blog posts. We hope you’ll enjoy reading these much more than before. We’ve seriously trimmed down the content, reshuffled some sections and cleaned up others, which will hopefully make the whole thing look and read better. Let’s hope this was worth the months-long delay. If you still want to scroll through all the changes in the new app/extractor versions, check out their respective GitHub release pages.

For the previous release cycle, 0.25.1, the team tried to get in as many bug fixes as possible, clearing the table for some major feature work for this cycle. These features have been sought after for quite a while, so we’re excited to finally see them become a part of the app!

First and foremost, the app FINALLY supports multiple audio tracks! No more Arabic Mr Beast! (Except for those who want it, of course!) Hence the title of this post, for those who were wondering, is “What did you say?” in Japanese.

There’s a new ExoPlayer settings menu which has been added to fix niche yet longstanding player crashes. Ideally, we wouldn’t need this menu at all, but OS developers make mistakes, and updating/switching to another OS/device isn’t always an option for users. You don’t need to care about this menu if nothing is broken for you, but if you encounter player crashes for whatever reason, try giving it a go!

If you still haven’t downloaded the update, but now really want to, jump to the Downloads section here.

As always, make sure you take a backup of your database before upgrading. If you have root privileges, then backing up the entire app’s data is also an option.

Highlights

These are the main changes you’ll notice in the app:

• IT IS HERE! @Theta-Dev added support for multiple audio tracks in YouTube videos. The Extractor support was already added in the previous version, if you can remember. There’s a new drop-down menu in the player screen to choose the audio track. There is also a Content setting to always prefer descriptive audio, for our accessibility-enabled users.

• @AudricV has added an ExoPlayer settings menu under Video and audio settings. These are custom experimental settings for ExoPlayer (the media player library that NewPipe uses) which have been found to solve certain niche bugs and problems users have faced over a long time. This is expecially true for Android TVs and TV boxes from companies that customise the OS, many of which need the “media tunneling” function disabled for videos to work properly.

• Thanks to @Theta-Dev being a bawse, downloads from YouTube are no longer throttled! This should take care of all those ongoing downloads that slow down to a crawl, or come to a complete stop towards the end, requiring repeated restarts.

What’s New

Thanks to everyone who contributed this release cycle! Whether it was features, bug fixes, or translations, we appreciate your effort! We’re mentioning a few of them here. For the rest, check out the app’s Release Notes, as well as the Extractor changes.

App

• @Marius1501 has made the volume and brightness gestures customisable! Now you can toggle them individually, and even change which half of the screen they work on.

• Continuing the customisability momentum, @Marius1501 added an option to move the main page tabs to the bottom!

• A new language, ߒߞߏ / N’Ko (nqo), has been added to the language chooser. Thanks, @MBKaba!

• … and right on the heels of that, @kuragehimekurara1 also added translations and support for the Uchinaguchi language!

• @quarthex added support for links to the ‘peertube.stream’ instance.

• @Stypox fixed a wacky bug on PeerTube where the channel avatar would be swapped with the avatar of its subchannel.

Extractor

This section is to talk specifically about the NewPipe Extractor. These changes do not necessarily affect the app itself, but may be important for other consumers of the Extractor library, such as Piped.

• @FireMasterK added support for AV1 itags! This means that the Extractor can now recognise AV1 streams on YouTube, for example.

• @TobiGr added several more audio formats to SoundCloud! Look for a creator that uploads their music in FLAC, and treat your ears to some high quality lossless audio. Though opus is great of course. (“Hey, thanks!” “Oh, I was referring to the actual codec, not you.” ”:(“ )

• @petlyh added a proper error message for Bandcamp tracks that are only accessible to users that have paid for them. This requires user authentication, and since NewPipe cannot log in anywhere, such tracks need to be played in the browser or another app.

• @ChunkyProgrammer added support for the extraction of playlist descriptions. If you use Piped, try opening a playlist and see the difference it makes to the UI!

Known Issues

• Player notification actions set from app player notification settings are not used on Android 13 and above. This is related to targeting Android 13/API 33 or higher: apps cannot completely personalize media notifications. Check out #9764 for more details.

• The app crashes when playing content in fullscreen on some devices: our usage of the ExoPlayer library does not correctly handle rendering to a different surface than the starting one and crashes when trying to switch to fullscreen. See #9023 for more details and workarounds.

• YouTube Trends are not shown sometimes and no videos are shown in this case: YouTube is A/B testing a new trends UI which completely reworks what data is sent and how it is displayed. This new structure is currently not supported by the extractor. See NewPipeExtractor#1046 for more details.

Wanna Contribute?

If you like the app enough to want to make it even better, or you noticed some glaring error that you can’t help but want to fix, you can read our contribution guidelines and do a Fix-It Felix.

Or, if you’re bilingual (or even multilingual), you could help translate the app.

Feature additions have been put on hold for now. We’re pretty swamped as it is, and are working to clear our large (and critical) feature backlog first. Once we get a handle on that, we will revisit this decision.

Downloads

NewPipe notifies you about new versions. You can download them when you tap 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 have 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!

Bugs and Support

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), Matrix #newpipe:libera.chat or open issues on GitHub.

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 until the end! We put quite some time into these blog posts; you reading through it is greatly appreciated.