YouTube is back to working again! Apart from that, NewPipe 0.19.7 and 0.19.8 come with auto-play for all services and numerous fixes.

Once again: YouTube fixes

Ah - what a night! Did you sleep well? Well, we didn’t. On Monday, YouTube decided to change some things in their player again. These kinds of changes typically modify how the data of contained streams is extracted. As a result, NewPipe and other services like youtube-dl or Invidious cannot access the stream and video data. Way too many of you have seen the result: nothing works.

The folks at youtube-dl were quick and delivered a fix incredibly fast. @TobiGr converted the fix from Python to Java and used @wb9688’s work from a previous pull request to improve the handling of the patterns to decrypt the player info. We were able to release a new version of NewPipe Extractor, the library which gathers all the info you can see in the app, at 2am. Unfortunately, this did not mean, we could release a new version of NewPipe straight away. Programmers sign their applications so devices and users can verify they have an official version which has not been compromised by a third party. In our case, signing is done by @TheAssassin. However, he was not available in the morning and luckily managed to sign the created APK later in the afternoon. That created the big delay between creating a fix and releasing a new version. We hope, you can understand that. We did not want to let you wait an extra time with a broken NewPipe version ;)

Apart from that, @wb9688 fixed loading more search results as well as age restricted videos not having any video info. Yes - YouTube was busy with changing stuff lately and so were we.

Auto-play and TV improvements

@wb9688 also made a load of internal improvements to enable auto-play for all services. Previously, only YouTube was supported. Alexander– stepped in again for Android TV users and fixed focus box lingering in places where it should not be. It’s vanishing now correctly.

What’s up next

While we concentrated on minor improvements and bug fixes lately, big things are in the making! @avently has been working on a new app workflow for multiple months. These changes are in their final stage and need some more testing to ensure we ship an entirely working player for all Android versions and devices. In case you have time and are willing to help, please head over to GitHub and test the latest APK.

Where to get the latest version

NewPipe notifies you about new versions, you can download them when you press the notification. An alternative is the GitHub release page. If you use the F-Droid app, it notifies you as well about an update for NewPipe - please keep in mind that it can take F-Droid a while to update their repository. If you have problems installing you may need to uninstall NewPipe then reinstall (make sure to backup data).

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

• Wait for them to update or
• Switch to the NewPipe repository by following the directions in the announcement (if you had previously installed NewPipe from GitHub releases you will not have to uninstall NewPipe to switch)

Now that you’ve 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 send them in the comments here and someone will reply to you (in the past we have been pretty slow with this, but I will be better for this one).