Newpipe still works on Android.

I just use Newpipe

However, Piped and Invidious are not dead. YouTube is trying really hard to kill them but they still work somewhat. It is a cat and mouse game.

NewPipe or Patched YouTube App using ReVanced Manager

yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all <url> is the way. It turns playlist link into nicely named, curated video files awaiting to played by a regular video player

https://grayjay.app/

Grayjay by FUTO has been working well for me

As others have said, invidious is not dead, and they're working on factoring out the part that interfaces with YouTube itself, so that updates to react to changes in YouTube will be able to be implemented much faster.

FreeTube still works for my Linux system, for most videos.

My personal Invidious server works just fine.

Self hosted Invidious still works

I believe that YouTube supports RSS. I haven't used it in years, but gPodder allowed subscribing to channels.

Ah, yeah. From this post:

• Go to the YouTube channel page.
• Click more for the About box.
• Scroll down to click Share channel. Choose Copy channel ID.
• Get the feed from https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= plus that channel ID from the previous step.

From there, something (like a podcast client) needs to grab the video.

Otherwise, I've been using Tartube to download to my media server, which is not great but fine, except for needing to delete the lock file when it (or the computer) crashes, and the fact that the media server hasn't the foggiest idea of how to organize the "episodes."

I was using freshrss which can grab the rad feed for a channel, but I’ve moved to tube archivist with a Jellyfin plugin. Now they are all predownloaded and just show up on my tv via Jellyfin app.

It’s a way better way to keep track of what you want to watch.

Addressing the subscribing part; I had similar requirements, so I started subscribing via FreshRSS while using a custom theme to give it a YouTube-like experience.

I shared the setup a few month ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21381606

Edit: One of the benefits of using selfhosted RSS with a web interface is that it is platform agnostic.

Freetube and mpv (uses yt-dlp in the background) work well for me 🤷

Anti Commercial-AI license

I used NewPipe for a while, now I'm trying out a fork called PipePipe. https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe

Revanced and Firefox + uBlock Origin.

First one's hard to set up, but I'm sure anybody self-hosting literally anything could do it in two seconds.

I’m using News Explorer for my RSS feeds which also supports subscribing to YouTube channels. In the newer versions it even pulls the comments from YT.

I am already paying for proton vpn for other reasons and connecting to other countries that don’t allow ads seems to work. It even works on NVIDIA media player and I might even assume Apple TV. I just lost my premium today so yeah

Edit. Just noticed this is a self hosted sub, I’ll just leave this in case someone needs the info but otherwise I’ll delete

https://github.com/alexta69/metube and Plex

I was going to recommend android apps until I saw iOS. I don't know anyones that let you keep a local subscription like newpipe does without needing to sideload. So if there are I'd be interested.

On my phone I still use LibreTube but with the option to load the video directly from YouTube (essentially doing what NewPipe is doing) and on PC I just use YouTube's directly. I still use Piped to keep my subscriptions synchronized tho.

i "subscribe" via rss in freshrss, just use the normal youtube.com on desktop and mobile browser. StoptheMadness on iOS to strip ads