Santa came a little late this year and dropped NewPipe 0.18.0! In this new version support for PeerTube has been added and many improvements to the downloader were made. Additionally many bugs have been fixed and a couple of cool improvements allow an even smoother usage.

support

@yausername put much effort into adding a fourth service to NewPipe: PeerTube. In case you do not know PeerTube, one can describe it as an open source decentralized video streaming platform.

NewPipe supports most of PeerTube’s native features like searching, playing and downloading videos or reading comments. There is one structural point which differs PeerTube from all other so far supported services. Because PeerTube is decentralized, there are hundreds of instances available in the fediverse. We choose to use FramaTube as default instance, because the main organization behind PeerTube is the software developer Framasoft. NewPipe allows you to select the instances you like and add them to your personal list. You can switch between them seamlessly.

We’d like to provide some kind of help to point out donating options for selected instances. We are looking forward to hear your opinion on this topic and happy about suggestions where to add donation hints. Please feel free to leave your comment here. Also, PeerTube supports peer-to-peer, but NewPipe does not yet. We’d welcome any help and ideas for a proper implementation. In case you are interested in helping out, you can find the current discussion over at GitHub.

Downloader improvements

@kapadomy continued his awesome work on the downloader. in this release he calculated an estimated remaining download time which is shown on the download panel. In case you needed to pause a download (or some network interruption forced you to do so), NewPipe can now recover the expired download links and resume it after a long time. In case there should be an error while downloading an audio or video, the app now displays more debug info helping to track the cause down.

Improvements and bug fixes

This release covers a bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements and small additions. This includes a fix for devices running Android 8 and later which have a native light navigation bar. With black theme enabled on these devices, the navigation bar should be black now, too. Please thank @marcovr for this small tweak which give your eyes a rest. @mauriciocolli provided important improvements which lay the ground for subscription groups and a full functional feed which we hope to ship soon. He cleaned up the extractor and adjusted localization changes, cleaned up kiosk pages (e.g. YouTube’s Trending and SoundCloud’s Top 50/New & Hot) and improved their performance.

@Mitosagi fixed a bug that prevented one to move the popup player if another finger was placed on the screen while trying to move the popup player. @PeterHindes and @Redirion worked together to detect playlists which are probably auto-generated. As result, those playlists and other playlists with no valid uploader can now be bookmarked locally without crashing the app.

There were serious problems with SoundCloud making it unusable. @TobiGr fixed the extraction of the client_id which is required to fetch any information from SoundCloud. On top of that, SoundCloud also changed and secured the audio streams causing NewPipe to be rejected by the servers. We managed to collect all information to authenticate properly. Thanks to all, who helped to solve this problem!

People using devices running Android KitKat were facing network errors when accessing MediaCCC. @mqus solved this by enabling TLS1.1/1.2 on Android 4.4 devices to fix the TLS handshakes with MediaCCC and also some PeerTube instances.

@Redirion updated the ExoPlayer version improving playback performance and solving small issues. We’ve decided to accept Kotlin code in the app repository. However, the extractor repository remains to be coded with pure Java.

For more information on this release, a collection of merged PRs, the source code and more, take a look at the release page.

Help wanted for website maintenance

Developing NewPipe and replying to questions, handling bugreports and reviewing pull requests consumes much time. Therefore it is hard to keep the website up to date and write release posts. If you like writing blog posts and think you could help us there, please see this issue.

Where to get the latest version

We recommend you to install the F-Droid app as it notifies you as soon as an update for NewPipe is available.

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, or send in fixes yourself.