Have you fully read the last blog post and remember the first paragraph in the Whats New section? Do you not and you can’t care less? Well, I don’t care either, I have a story for both of you…

Yes, another release. The developers told me they are deeply sorry. And now it is on me to try to explain why you have to update (and I have to write a blogpost…) again.

The build four days ago was a preparation for March, where YouTube shuts down the way NewPipe used to access their website. The release happened as quickly as possible in order to get the update out in time to F-Droid users, since NewPipe basically faces a wait-time of a week for each update.

Now, as you can imagine, basically every part of the app relies in one way or another on a properly parsed YouTube site. After pushing out the update and ensuring in advance that basic functionalities do work with the new way of accessing YouTube, users and developers where quick to realize that not everything works as well as it used to. So the NewPipe team decided to push out a hotfix for the hotfix, addressing these issues.

A lot. All of the entries in the list fix issues not happening in 0.18.4. We have two general improvements though. @Stypox improved the playback. You are already able to increase the tempo and pitch, and can unlink those settings. So far, you would need to unlink them in every video. Now, NewPipe remembers what you selected, so you can watch every video as linked or unlinked as you like.

Those people where involved in the fixes, some more, some less: @wb9688, @mauriciocolli @B0pol, @gzsombor, @TobiGr and @Stypox. Thanks to all of them, and thanks to people reporting the issues!

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.

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.

Do you remember the last releases we titled hotfix? Do you want to know what is different this time? Yes? Come closer, and let me tell you a story about 0.18.5.

Once upon a time (August 2017), YouTube decided to launch a redesign of their website. They applied Material Design and a dark theme. Just with any other website (I am looking at you reddit), the backslash of the community existed, which is probably why Google provided an opt-out. Since NewPipe was written before this design was provided, we continued to opt into using the old one. Everybody was more or less happy and life went on its unstoppable way.

We made a point in totally ignoring the existing of this new interface, mainly because it did not change much unlike its new counterpart. Sadly, the new features Google provided over time landed mostly only on the new material designed page. This is the reason (according to their official blog post) why they decided to stop providing the old one, beginning in March. And this is why the keyboards of our developers were smoking in the last days.

Luckily, not much. NewPipe looks as amazing as ever. Two of our lead developers went out of their way and spend each a full half hour of their life to test the app and did not encounter any new bugs. So you should expect this release to be as rock-solid as its predecessors ;) A big thanks goes out to said developers: TobiGr and wb9688. Also thanks to yausername for reporting this in the first place, so we were able to panic react soon enough.

It also means that starting in March, our old versions will stop working. So make sure to update until then!

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.

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.

It is here, really. Folks, a new minor release of NewPipe: 0.18.4! Bringing you copy-able comments, a kodi-share button, a language selector(!) and many improvements/fixes.

Yes, you did not misread that part. Finally, there is the possibility for you to select the language NewPipe runs in. You can access this setting via Settings > Content > App language. Your selected language will be applied after you restart the app. Big thanks to @B0pol for implementing this. And while you scroll down the impressive list of available languages, thank in your mind all the amazing people helping translate NewPipe over at Weblate and maybe become one of them :)

Since v0.16.0, you can view comments inside the app. Now, roughly a year later and because of the work @harshlele, you can copy them. All you have to do is long press the comment you’d like to share - that’s it.

If you read this heading and thought “Hey. I have this Kodi button enabled in my settings. Do I get another button?” Damn right you get. Presenting the in-player-kodi-button:

Do you know those ReCaptcha images you have to solve when you surf some websites? Some of our users have seen this inside of NewPipe :( While there is no way to let them magically disappear, NewPipe is now able to deal with them properly, thanks to @Stypox’s developing and @juanfra684’s testing. @karkaminski improved the main view of the app through removing the legacy dot menu next to the magnifying glass. Also included in his changes is the removing of the history sidebar entry if you don’t have history enabled (kinda makes sense).

@harshlele strikes again, this time improving the way of asking for the permission to display over other apps. Should work properly now on devices running Android 6+. @B0pol made quite some fixes in his second contribution: PeerTube videos get full descriptions now as well as markdown applied. PeerTube itself received proper handling of age limits, the recently added feed got fixed (the upload date was off by as many hours as you are from GMT) and its thumbnail is now in high quality. MediaCCCs video descriptions respect newlines and timestamps in YouTube video descriptions work again.

Did you ever long press on your local playlists and were bothered by the fact that you are only able to delete, not rename then? Well not anymore, now you can do both in the same menu, thanks to @XiangRongLin. If you notice some slight changes in the English strings in this release, you are correct, @comradekingu updated them.

@B0pol third contribution immensely improves the app for non-English speaker: The country NewPipe sets you in is now set to the one of your system language - No more UK videos in the Trending section if you are actually a proud Russian. This only applies to new installations, don’t worry if you enjoy your English feed, друг.

Changing the brightness for the first time while playing a video now doesn’t reset itself, @vhsw did that. @raphj fixed a bug where the video continued to be played when the screen is turned of. @kapodamy apparently enjoys working subtitle files as much as the next guy, so there you have them, no more cutting off at line breaks. He didn’t stop there, also downloading to SD cards works now on not CTF compliant devices.

Using a KitKat android device will not stop you anymore from downloading subtitles, thanks to @mqus. The third contribution of @kapodamy stops the app from treating a corrupt .mp4 file as audio. And finally, @chr56 made up-to-date Chinese translation possible.

That’s it for this release. A big thanks goes out to all the people who made this possible, especially those not mentioned: Developers for helping out fellow developers, testers for testing, maintainers for maintaining, users like you for reporting the bugs in the first place and in this release especially the translators who had to work after the English base strings changed. If you’d like to get a more technical view into the app, you can find the release page here and the corresponding PR here.

If you also like the idea of contributing to this project, but nothing has spoken to you so far, maybe you’d like to write blog posts? Please see this issue.

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.

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.

A change on SoundCloud side made it necessary to make some edits to the SoundCloud Extractor, so a new update for NewPipe is here!

Since this is a hotfix release, it does not contain any new feature or bugfix, except for the SoundCloud Extractor fixup. If you see any Guru Mediation error in the app, please update to 0.18.3 before you create an issue (you can verify if you actually have 0.18.3+ installed by tapping About in the app drawer menu).

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.

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.

8 days after the last release and the next one is already out: A hotfix for the Extractor! A change on YouTube’s side made it necessary.

A hotfix release regarding the Extractor usually means that all the older versions of NewPipe are likely to fail to play YouTube videos - this release is no difference. If you see any Guru Mediation error in the app, please update to this version before you create an issue (and/or verify that you actually have 0.18.2+ installed via hitting the About section in the left menu).

YouTube changed how they handled json. The actual fix was implemented by @TobiGr, with the help of @theScrabi and (arguably even more helping) @amuc. It was based on @dstftw’s implementation in youtube-dl. A big thanks goes to everyone involved.

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.

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.

Happy new year! Behold, the first release of 2020, NewPipe 0.18.1. This version, as you probably already guessed from the patch digit increase, focuses mainly on bug fixes and improvements. That being said, there is a fancy new feature for you: Video thumbnails on the lock screen.

Thanks to the work of @K1rakishou, every user with Android 5.0+ can enjoy a fitting lockscreen now when they play YouTube videos in the background. In case you don’t want your background to change in that situation, we have you covered as well. There is a new option in Settings > Video & Audio > Player:

@dotvirus improved the Background/Popup button. Since 16.2, you are able to long press on them in playlists and the whole playlists gets added to the queue. Now this works with local playlists as well. Thanks to @atpamat, the main page view improved significantly. As you probably know, you can select which tabs you see on it via Settings > Appearance > Content of main page. Now you can add as many tabs as you want or only have one lonely one, the header will always look good!

Ever played a video in the background and noticed that the app starts to lag? Well, not any more (hopefully), again thanks to @atpamat. The amount of notification thumbnail updates while using the background players is now limited, which should fix this issue. There is another very specific issue with thumbnails which got fixed in this release. When you created a playlist with one video, deleted that and added a new one, the thumbnail wasn’t updated. Now it gets, thanks to @ecarvalhobo.

Last release, it was tried to update the webm/opus downloader to download .opus files instead of .webm. This didn’t fully work out, but now @kapodamy fixed that issue. Thanks to the sharp eyes of @opusforlife2 who noticed and reported the problem. @kszczek improved the Downloads section, specifically the download deletion process. When pressing on the trash can button, you can decide if you want to clear the download history or all downloaded files.

NewPipe now supports the custom /c/shortened_url channel URLs YouTube gives to qualified channels. This was implemented by @B0pol, thank you.

@Nico-late fixed a bug which froze the UI when you shared a YouTube link from another app to NewPipe and then selected download. Also, the correct filename in this scenario is used now. When you played a video, the player was started on the wrong thread which resulted in a bunch of warnings in the logs and reduced performance. Thanks to @mauriciocolli, we can now concentrate on the important logs :).

The next bug was a bit trickier: The search result is returned in chunks from the Extractor, but in the way they were created, items being in previous chunks could reappear in following ones, as @PhoenixDiscord noticed. Not anymore, thanks to @gzsombor. @7FM fixed an Extractor crash which happened sometimes when videos got played.

@B0pol (again!) fixed a bug where comments weren’t displayed when an invidio.us URL was used to get to the video. Thanks to @pihug12, the hardcoded SoundCloud client_id was updated, speeding up the first SoundCloud request of a session.

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.

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 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.

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.

@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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

You might have wondered why there haven’t been any release announcements since 0.16.2. Unfortunately, writing these blog posts can consume a lot of time which our developers often think is better invested in writing new features or fixing bugs.

However, you, the users, should have the chance to track all the changes made from release to release in such summaries, and we apologize for having had let things slide for a while. In this blog post, I want to provide a really short summary of what has changed in the last months, and what is yet to come in the upcoming 0.18.0 release.

In 0.17.1, the team fixed a lot of bugs. There were disappearing buttons, performance issues as well as an unnecessary storage of settings. In the extractor, a bug causing an intermittent issue (yay, that’s the kind of bug developers like most!) in the YouTube video search within NewPipe as well as a problem with the ever annoying ReCaptcha widgets have been fixed.

There’s also been a couple of improvements. For instance, an action regarding long-press menus for the playlists has been restored. Also, a switch has been added to choose between the Storage Access Framework (SAF) or legacy file pickers. This is important as some ROMs haven’t implemented the SAF completely and are therefore not fully compliant with the so-called CTS. NewPipe now detects whether the SAF is available and if not uses the old picker as a fallback.

The only novelty introduced in this release is a localization for Thai. Thanks to all translators helping make NewPipe available in native languages!

It seems the 0.17.0 release hasn’t made it through due to some issues. However, @TobiGr has provided a summary of what has changed from 0.17.0 to 0.17.1. New features involved a playback resume feature that allows for resuming streams where you stopped last time after switching to another stream. Furthermore, the downloader received a couple of minor additions, and there also have a few improvements and of course many bug fixes.

For more information, see also the release page, which also contains a description of the 0.17.0 release.

0.17.2 was a hotfix release that became necessary due to changes made by YouTube to their website, which broke most alternative YouTube frontends as well, including youtube-dl.

Big thanks to @Stypox for providing a fix soon after the issue was reported, allowing us to publish the fix quickly (not even a single day, after all!).

I want to repeat once again that we highly appreciate bug reports by users. They’re by far the most important line of feedback we can utilize. However, I ask you not to overuse “same here” in comments following an initial bug report. Please use less spammy methods like GitHub reactions (the small emoticons on the lower left corner) to confirm a bug. If you can contribute more useful information such as links to other repositories affected by the same bug or results of your own investigation, please don’t hesitate to comment. Problems arise only when there’s too much off-topic such as YouTube bashing or simple confirms, they produce a huge wave of notifications, mails etc., and distract from the really useful comments. We’ve had similar issues lately in other issues and PRs, and this really just binds resources that are better invested in writing fixes.

For more information, see also the release page.

In this release, again many improvements have been added to NewPipe. Most notably, a new option has been added to clear all positions in playlists. Until then, you had to clear your entire watch history, however in most cases that’s undesirable. Another useful addition is that NewPipe can now show hidden files in the file picker.

Most of you probably know invidio.us, a free/open-source alternative web frontend to YouTube. NewPipe has been able to open links to the central instance for a while already. 0.17.3 now also supports opening URLs pointing to all publicly listed instances, which means you can open links to Invidious in NewPipe just like you can open links to YouTube. Also, links to music.youtube.com can now be opened in NewPipe.

The most interesting bugs fixed in this release are an annoying exception caused by a small but important typo in the extractor. Furthermore, a bug in the playback of live streams has been resolved. Also, a bug producing performance problems has been fixed in the extractor.

For more information, see also the release page.

In 0.17.4, the accessibility for blind people has been improved a little. Thanks to @fcnjd for assisting @theScrabi with helpful advice while implementing these changes. Furthermore, the wording of the description of the “video download folder” has been improved grammar wise.

Some bugs have been fixed regarding the download of videos from YouTube. Furthermore, some bugs related to scrolling have been resolved. The “clear search box” is now animated properly, and a lot of issues with the SoundCloud implementation could be fixed in this release, making this provider more reliable than ever before.

A few minor changes involve an upgrade of two dependencies (ExoPlayer and OkHttp) as well as migrating to the Android X APIs (a rather large and notable change that shouldn’t go unmentioned).

For more information, see also the release page.

Soon Team NewPipe will be able to release version 0.18.0. We will post a release announcement here once ready. A few changes which we can announce already involve using new localization and downloader implementations introduced in the extractor as well as adding support for the Kotlin language, allowing the development of new features in this language. Another noteworthy feature we can announce already is the overhaul of the “What’s new” section, including a properly sorted feed and subscription groups to further improve your user experience.

We hope you can understand the reasons for the missing release announcements. We’ll try to post updates on our work more regularly again. Let us know what you think in the comments. If you like writing blog posts and think you could help us there, please see this issue.

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.

Team NewPipe lost some of your donations through a Bitcoin scam. The founder of NewPipe, Christian Schabesberger, explains the details of the attack in an open letter to the community.

Dear NewPipe users/developer/maintainer,

Earlier this year, on 26 June 2019, I fell victim to a bitcoin scam. Unfortunately, we, the team, lost all the donated bitcoins we had received until that date.

My intention was to sell all the coins, as the current trading rate was at around ~10.000€ per coin at this time. The amount of coins

I reported the issue to the German police right after the incident, providing as many details and digital traces as I could collect, and as far as I know,

A careful user found traces for an incident on the Bitcoin wallet and asked for more details on GitHub. I have to admit that I totally forgot that I intended to write a blog post like this, explaining the incident in detail and what actions have been taken. I did not intend to hold back information, but simply forgot about informing our donors, contributors and users.

I sincerely apologize for this incident, I am very sorry about what happened and we are working on moving financial project responsibilities away from me. @TheAssassin and @TobiGr have plans on founding a NewPipe e.V., a public not-for-profit association under German jurisdiction, to take over maintenance of the project and handle the financial aspects (i.e., the donations, and what will be funded by those). This way, a set of people will decide about the money and share the responsibility.

Yours sincerely

Christian Schabesberger

NewPipe 0.16.2 is a bugfix release which comes along with better readable comments, smaller UX improvements, better translations, bugfixes and more.

After introducing support for reading comments in version 0.16.1, @yausername put more effort into the comments UX. In other words, the comment’s font size has been enlarged. We hope you are going to enjoy reading comments even more. When scrolling through them, you might recognize that links and video timestamps have been made clickable. On top of that the app can now remember whether you last viewed the comments or the ‘next videos’ tab and switch to it automatically when opening a video page.

@Stypox made it possible to share the video with its current timestamp through the main player’s dropdown menu. @nv95 added a close button to the main player which is shown whenever the playqueue is finished.

By pressing long on the Background button in the playlist view, you can now enqueue a whole playlist to the current playqueue. To play a stream directly in background without opening the video page, just tap long on an item in a stream list and choose Play directly in Background.

When sharing text with NewPipe which is not an URL, the app automatically shows performs a search using the currently active service. Moreover, this release includes support for opening invidious links, a tiny resource clean-up resulting in less code and a smaller APK. We also updated third-party libraries which should bring performance improvements to the video player. As always, the new version comes with bug fixes. @Stypox fixed a parsing bug which prevented many streams from loading as well as failing YouTube subscription imports. @Rediron made some improvements to the update checker (only available in the GitHub release) preventing crashes when no internet connection is available.

The English translations for play and enqueue commands were update and more specified by @epitron. At this point we would like to thank all the people who contributed to NewPipe in this release by either writing code, participating in discussions, reporting bugs and translating it into various languages!

By the way: If you haven’t seen it yet, we recently published a video in which NewPipe lead maintainer Christian Schabesberger covers the latest developments of the project, talks about plans for the future and makes a personal statement about his future in the project. You can watch the video here.

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.