vaginessa/freetube

An Open Source YouTube app for privacy

FreeTube is an open source desktop YouTube player built with privacy in mind. Use YouTube without advertisments and prevent Google tracking from you with their cookies and JavaScript. Available for Windows, Mac & Linux thanks to Electron.

Please note that FreeTube is currently in Beta. While it should work well for most users, there are still bugs and missing features that need to be addressed.

Download FreeTube

Browser Extension

Download our browser extension so that you can click on videos in your browser and have them automatically open up in FreeTube.

Download for Firefox

Instructrions for Google Chrome

How does it work?

FreeTube uses the proprietary YouTube HTTP API with a set of hard coded API keys. Videos are resolved using youtube-dl and played using the stock HTML5 video player. While YouTube can still see your API and video requests it can no longer track you using cookies or JavaScript. Your subscriptions, history, and saved videos are stored locally on your computer and never sent out. Using a VPN or Tor is recommended to hide your IP while using FreeTube.

Screenshots

Features

• Watch videos without ads
• Use YouTube without Google tracking you using cookies and JavaScript
• Make API calls through the Tor network
• Subscribe to channels without an account
• Local subscriptions, history, and saved videos
• Export & import subscriptions
• Open videos from your browser directly into FreeTube (with extension)
• Mini Player
• Light / dark theme

Contributing

If you have an idea or if you found a bug, please submit a GitHub issue so that we can track it. Please search the existing issues before submitting to prevent duplicates.

If you like to get your hands dirty and want to contribute, we would love to have your help. Send a pull request and someone will review your code. Please follow the Contribution Guidelines before sending your pull request.

Thank you very much to the People and Projects that make FreeTube possible!

Contact

If you ever have any questions, feel free to make an issue here on GitHub. Alternatively, you can email me at [email protected] or you can join our Matrix Server. Don't forget to check out the rules before joining.

License

FreeTube is Free Software: You can use, study share and improve it at your will. Specifically you can redistribute and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.