xda-developers: Open source YouTube client “NewPipe” adds Android TV support and a YouTube Music parser

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Open source YouTube client “NewPipe” adds Android TV support and a YouTube Music parser

The open-source YouTube client on Android — NewPipe — is a great alternative to the YouTube app for those of you who don’t have Google Play Services on your phone. The client doesn’t use YouTube APIs and simply parses the YouTube website to extract data and play the videos you want, without any restrictions or ads. Due to the way NewPipe works, it also circumvents any limitations that Google might add to the YouTube app. For instance, YouTube recently restricted the quality of videos on smartphones to 480p in India following the nationwide lockdown imposed in the country in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. But users could easily overcome this restriction by using NewPipe instead.

Now, in a bid to make the client even more useful for users, the developers behind NewPipe are rolling out a major update that brings support for Android TV, adds a YouTube Music parser, and more. According to a recent blog post from the developers, NewPipe version 0.19.3 is now rolling out to users and it brings the following noteworthy changes:

Android TV support

While you could already run previous versions of NewPipe on an Android TV, the client didn’t officially support the platform. Due to this, the client had some issues that made it practically unusable. With the latest update, the developers have addressed all such issues and you can now use NewPipe on your Android TV without facing any annoying bugs.

Following the update, you’ll be able to scroll through long video descriptions, focus on any element on the screen, use the native keyboard instead of an on-screen one, seek videos however you like, and face no annoying ripple effects. To try out NewPipe on your Android TV, you can download the APK from the GitHub link below and sideload it on your TV.

YouTube Music parser

With the latest update, NewPipe also gets the ability to natively parse the YouTube Music library and allow users to easily search for music. To search for YouTube Music content on the client, you can tap on the filter button in the search UI and select either Songs, Videos, Albums, or Playlists to see search results from YouTube Music.

NewPipe

Along with the aforementioned changes, NewPipe v0.19.3 also brings a ton of improvements and bug fixes to the client. Here’s the complete changelog for the latest update:

New
- Search on YouTube Music
- Basic Android TV support
Improved
- Improved checking for new version
- Avoid unnecessary changes to the upload date of saved streams
- Save and restore playback parameters into/from preferences
- Show message when content isn’t supported yet instead of crashing
- Improved size handling of the drawer header title
- Improved popup player resize with pinch gestures
- Enqueue streams on long press on background and popup buttons in channel
- Added the ability to remove all watched videos from a local playlist
Fixed
- Fixed visibility of group sort button in the subscriptions fragment
- Fixed detection of network related exceptions
- Fixed age restricted content setting not working
- Fixed certain kinds of reCAPTCHAs
- Fixed crash when opening bookmarks while playlist is null
- Fixed escaping in JSON created by the crash reported by using nanojson instead of org.json
Development
- Added Checkstyle to build scripts & code style improvements
- Fixed F-Droid build by ensuring the debug apk file name is used only in debug builds
- Force UTF-8 encoding for Gradle