YouTube won't let me watch this video with my VPN on. Is this a new thing?
I like how they make up a phony benefit to try to make it seem like you'll get something out of it.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Try the Freetube or Grayjay client, they work for me with VPN.
Depends in the VPN. I’m having to use multi-hop now with Freetube but with that turned on it is working consistently for me again.
I spun up my own invidious container and that has made my connection far more consistent.
Ay any tips?
You can run it as a docker, pretty easily.
Run this to generate your visitor_data and po_token
docker run quay.io/invidious/youtube-trusted-session-generator
Clone the repo in link below (step 2) and paste those values into your docker_compose.yml file in the appropriate fields. Also, generate a nice long string for the hmac_key
https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#docker-compose-method-production
This does give you an "identity" with YouTube, but you can generate new tokens as often as you want, replace them in your yml, and restart the container.
Once the container is running, update FreeTube settings abs change the "current invidious instanc" to http://localhost:3000/
Let me know if you get stuck.
They're killing third-party client access, limiting adblockers, blocking VPNs, and forcing sign in more and more. I sincerely hate it but this was inevitable. They have their monopoly, this is just the "abuse that position and enshittify for more data and money" stage. I hope an alternative takes off because I refuse to play by their rules.
If you are using a Free VPN, the would be A LOT of users using that server, so it looks like a denial of service attack from the server's POV.
Even when I used a paid VPN, I still have to try many servers before there is one that works.
When I used ProtonVPN, it was like 50/50 if it worked or not.
When I switched to Mullvad and now to IVPN, who have much less servers to choose from, I have to try like 7 servers before I found a working one, and so far it's been working fine for like the past week.
Its not a new thing. I've noticed it since last year (when I started using VPNs).
I watch YouTube all the time over Mullvad. It doesn't let me watch on the website without signing in tho.
If your going to sign in you might aswell turn off the vpn
Ooh, of all the possibilities I didn't have that one on my bingo sheet. I guess we'll be Torrenting YouTubers sooner than later.
No torrent needed, yt-dlp has you covered.
YT-dlp is about an inch away from being wiped out by them. All you need is the gaze of sauron. Forced logon and remove cookies in lieu of browser storage would set us back ages.
At some point they're just going to embed the commercials in the video stream or worse yet picture in picture them like broadcast TV did.