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Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems)
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Today I learned that YouTube is deliberately crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux. It will give you lowered video resolutions. If you just replace "aarch64" with "x86_64" in the UA, suddenly you get 4K and everything.
They literally have a test for "is ARM", and if so, they consider your system has garbage performance and cripple the available formats/codecs. I checked the code.
Logic: Quality 1080 by default. If your machine has 2 or fewer cores, quality 480. If anything ARM, quality 240. Yes, Google thinks all ARM machines are 5 times worse than Intel machines, even if you have 20 cores or something.
Why does this not affect Chromium? **Because chromium on aarch64 pretends to be x86_64**
`Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36`
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Welp, guess I'm shipping a user agent override for Firefox on Fedora to pretend to be x86.
**EDIT**: The plot thickens. Pretending to be ChromeOS aarch64 *still gets 4K*. Specifically: `Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS aarch64 10452.96.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36` still works.
I’ve had issues with Invidious and Piped literally every time I’ve tried to use them. Can’t understand how people even use the public servers.
However I have disabled Piped proxy in LibreTube and been using that for a long while but for the last week or so it hasn’t been working at all.
GrayJay is still working though.
I have also had piles of trouble. I don’t get how so many people apparently have none
It’s the same with all the other frontends (LibReddit, Nitter, etc.). They never work and everyone is just like “try a different instance!”. How many dozen different instances should I try before I give up?
Shout out to Stealth (Reddit) and Squawker (Twitter), those both work the vast majority of the time without any “instances” to depend on or switch through.
Google is blocking popular instances these days, so yeah, you basically need to find an unpopular instance, which usually means it’s new and may not live for long, or it will quickly become popular, because it works, which will cause Google to block it.
there’s a browser extension called libredirect that has a keyboard shortcut to switch between instances. you can also use freetube/newpipe/mpv.
I know what apps you can use. The apps are not the problem. The proxies are.
Good to know about Stealth. Thanks!
Yeah I might try the others a couple more times before giving up but it’s not gone well for me thusfar. Libreddit and invidious worked for me for like 4 days last time, both crapped out about the same time. It’s annoying to have to repeatedly troubleshoot what used to be something you could basically count on working
I tried it and my main complaint was it was like 720p, so lower quality (noticeable to me just looking at it). But it “just worked” for me. But I’m also not interested in YouTube enough to play this game - if they block me, I stop going there. It seems like they give up blocking me every so often (or something updates IDK).
Do you have a link for Stealth? Libreddit was working for me up until two days ago.
It’s on FDroid
There was a problem with DASH. Now it’s fixed, it should work with the proxy enabled.
As I said, it’s never worked with the proxy enabled. And it’s still not working with it disabled, right now.