Restore classic Youtube?

[Суки читают]

It still works, kind of. Open any video and you should get the normal design. If not, refresh the page. Then you can continue watching, navigate to the homepage, etc.

[VADemon]

Googlebot user agent works if you CTRL+F5 to refresh the page (or clear all history + prefs + cookies?). The first time I navigated youtube with Googlebot UA (while logged in my normal account), it presented me with the new design, but Ctrl+F5 fixed that and reloaded into the old design.

[pmjack]

They already extended availability way past the original stated migration date. I'm surprised it's still being persisted.
No, It will all go away. Material will be gone. Any tricks to still get it back will cease to function when they finally remove it everywhere.

The reason it still persists is because the polymer version is not index-able for search engines including...Google Search. Big oof. If you check Google cache of any youtube video page, you'll see they always cache the classic version.

[Moonchild]

The reason it still persists is because the polymer version is not index-able for search engines including...Google Search. Big oof.

Remember what I said about WebComponents changing document structures making it impossible to archive, process, etc. content? Well there you go. It bit them in the ass too then. GOOD.

[Ziko577]

The reason it still persists is because the polymer version is not index-able for search engines including...Google Search. Big oof.

Remember what I said about WebComponents changing document structures making it impossible to archive, process, etc. content? Well there you go. It bit them in the ass too then. GOOD.

If anything this will now force them to give us the option to stay on the old layout as they know this thing's a hot mess to code. It's now screwing up the channels pages with the new layout as of a couple of minutes ago for me. I'll try closing out of this to see if it'll fix itself.

EDIT: Nope. The channel pages are screwed up using the Googlebot UA. I reset it back to the original one and modified it to Firefox 42.0 for now. The subs page is the only one being affected by the 42.0 UA at this point as the whole site is pretty much on the Polymer layout. I do like the feature of if I'm watching or listening to something in a playlist I can search for something else too. That's a nice feature that should've been in the old layout. I think YT+ had it but I never used it as I preferred to keep things in separate tabs.

[Moonchild]

If anything this will now force them to give us the option to stay on the old layout as they know this thing's a hot mess to code.

no, it won't.
Google owns YouTube, remember? Nothing is stopping them from indexing it internally through a private channel. Heck, they could even scrape the databases directly if they wanted to.

[Ziko577]

If anything this will now force them to give us the option to stay on the old layout as they know this thing's a hot mess to code.

no, it won't.
Google owns YouTube, remember? Nothing is stopping them from indexing it internally through a private channel. Heck, they could even scrape the databases directly if they wanted to.

I knew about Google owning them but it's definitely a possibility they could do something that devious. Until that happens, I can still use the site mostly on the old layout as I replaced the disable polymer script with one that works well so far as the old one messed up the comments section really bad. The only differences now are just the video page, search page, and the landing page but that one I never go to anyway as I always login to go straight to the subscriptions. This is in conjunction with using the 42.0 UA I have set up for Youtube specifically.

[Alister]

Google owns YouTube, remember? Nothing is stopping them from indexing it internally through a private channel. Heck, they could even scrape the databases directly if they wanted to.

Yes, but if they will do this, other search engines will not be able to index YouTube.

[VADemon]

Off-topic:
Google can easily drop Youtube indexation. Many people search on Youtube for VERY MANY topics directly, without going to the search engine. The rest will enter "sexy minecraft girls video" into their URL bar to arrive first at Google (Hello, Chrome!) then on Youtube (...or maybe not ) But I think they won't do it over monopoly accusations. What they can surely do is impede other search engines in some way (delaying, less metadata...) and maybe they do already. (Btw, they have shadowbanning working on site, why not other tricks?)

For everyone else who cannot browse the new Youtube/if old stops working, try out https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube It's a command-line Youtube player (with search, queue, download etc.). The usage keys are a bit rusty to get used to, but its excellent for its simplicity and queueing mechanism for music. The only annoyance is to register your own API key (with a Google account), as it has not worked for me the very first try - the default API key it's shipped with isn't working.

[moonbat]

Minitube and Musictube, both by the same author, are excellent cross-platform desktop Youtube clients. The latter one is good if you use Youtube for plain music.

Or you can use my extension PMPlayer to simply play any Youtube (or other supported site) video in a floating popup window.

[Alister]

VLC player with some plugin can play videos and playlists from YouTube. And u can save and organize your bookmarks. But first u need to add urls there, so it's not a "video browser".

Many video players (POT player, Media player classic) can play videos from youtube but not playlists. POT player can play playlists but in latest build it doesn't work, maybe they will fix it.

foobar2000 have some addon to play music from youtube videos and playlists.

All software mentioned above is completely free.

Minitube

Is it free? I sought "buy" button there...

Or you can use my extension PMPlayer to simply play any Youtube (or other supported site) video in a floating popup window.

If only it had an option to stay on top of desktop and be borderless (like chrome Picture-in-Picture Extension), it would be one of the best solutions.
And sometimes it just don't work and says that "Video unavailable" (often happens with long videos).

[moonbat]

Is it free? I sought "buy" button there...

Free on Linux, I got from the repo. I think the free version prompts you to buy it once in a while.

[Alister]

In addition to my previous guide I found another solution. We can use mobile version of youtube website with mobile device user agents:

Android: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; Nexus 4 Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.114 Mobile Safari/537.36

iPhone 6: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25

iPad: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25

It's very fast and lightweight! There is a little inconvenience: video control buttons appears only if u click on video to pause it (in usual version they appear on mouse hover), that's because these devices don't have mouse and use touchscreen. I recommend to use Android user-agent as it have better video quality. iPhone and iPad quality limited to 360px. Another inconvenience is that playback is paused if you switch to another tab.

Well... I tried Windows Phone user-agent in Chrome, and it shows video controls on mouse hover, but u can't change video quality and... it doesn't work in Pale Moon.

Windows Phone 8: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 920)

So... if anyone will find another user-agents which are better suit Pale Moon, please reply in this thread.

[moonbat]

If only it had an option to stay on top of desktop and be borderless (like chrome Picture-in-Picture Extension), it would be one of the best solutions.
And sometimes it just don't work and says that "Video unavailable" (often happens with long videos).

The first part is a limitation of your window manager - on Linux for example, all windows can have an 'always on top' option in addition to the usual maximize/minimize/restore options in the window menu. The second part depends on whether the video uploader has restricted allowing it to be embedded. 'Official' channels by record companies often play spoilsport like this, so if you're watching a music video, say, chances are 99% you won't be able to make it play separately. I deliberately chose not to load a mini version of the Youtube site in the popup window because a) their website is always a moving target and b) the extension supports several other sites that use the same technology of embed tags.

[Alister]

Free on Linux, I got from the repo. I think the free version prompts you to buy it once in a while.

Windows free version often pause a video and tell you to buy it, so I gave it up. Also u can't bookmark a video or playlist, only a channel.