Version 0.16.0: API Improvements and Annotations

Hello again! This past month has seen 116 commits from 13 contributors and a couple important changes I'd like to announce.

A privacy policy is now available here. I've done my best to explain things as clearly as possible without oversimplifying, and would very much recommend reading it if you're concerned about your privacy and want to learn more about how Invidious uses your data. Please let me know if there is anything that needs clarification.

I'm also very happy to announce that a Spanish translation has been added to the site. You can use it with ?hl=es or by setting es as your default locale. As always I'm extremely grateful to translators for making the site accessible to more people.

For Administrators

Invidious now supports server-to-server push notifications. This uses PubSubHubbub to automatically handle new videos sent to an instance, which is less resource intensive and generally faster. Note that it will not pull all videos from a subscribed channel, so recommended usage is in addition to channel_threads. Using PubSub requires a valid domain that updates can be sent to, and a random string that can be used to sign updates sent to the instance. You can enable it by adding use_pubsub_feeds: true to your config.yml. See Configuration for more info.

Unfortunately there are a couple necessary changes to the DB to support liveNow and premiereTimestamp in subscription feeds. Migration scripts have been provided that should be used automatically if following the instructions here.

You can now configure default user preferences for your instance. This allows you to set default locale, player preferences, and more. See #415 for more details and example usage.

For Developers

The fields API has been added with #429 and is now supported on all JSON endpoints, thanks @afrmtbl! Syntax is straight-forward and can be used to reduce data transfer and create a simpler response for debugging. You can see an example here. I've been quite happy using it and hope it is similarly useful for others.

An /api/v1/annotations/:id endpoint has been added for pulling legacy annotation data from this archive, see below for more details. You can also access annotation data available on YouTube using ?source=youtube, although this will only return card data as legacy annotations were deleted on January 15th.

A couple minor changes to existing endpoints:

• A premiereTimestamp field has been added to /api/v1/videos/:id
• A sort_by param has been added to /api/v1/comments/:id, supports new, top.

More info is available in the documentation.

Annotations

I'm pleased to announce that annotation data is finally available from the roughly 1.4 billion videos archived as part of this project. They are accessible from the Internet Archive here or as a 355GB torrent, see here for more details. A corresponding /api/v1/annotations/:id endpoint has been added to Invidious which uses the collection from IA to provide legacy annotations.

Support for them in the player is possible thanks to this plugin developed by @afrmtbl. A PR for adding support to the site is available as #303. There's also an extension for overlaying them on top of the YouTube player (again thanks to @afrmtbl), and an extension for hooking into code still present in the YouTube player itself, developed by @tech234a.

I would recommend reading the official announcement for more details. I would like to again thank everyone that helped contribute to this project.

Finances

Donations

• Patreon : $42.42
• Liberapay : $70.11
• Crypto : ~$1.76 (converted from BCH, BTC, BSV)
• Total : $114.29

Expenses

• invidious-load1 (nyc1) : $10.00 (load balancer)
• invidious-update1 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (updates feeds)
• invidious-node1 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
• invidious-node2 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
• invidious-node3 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
• invidious-node4 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
• invidious-node5 (s-1vcpu-1gb) : $5.00 (web server)
• invidious-db1 (s-4vcpu-8gb) : $40.00 (database)
• Total : $80.00

This past month the site saw a couple abnormal peaks in traffic, so an additional webserver has been added to match the increased load. The goal on Patreon has been updated to match the above expenses.

Thanks everyone!