Support for Piped (Invidious alternative)

[Victor239]

Is your feature request related to a usage problem (not a bug)? Please describe.
Piped is a FOSS Invidious alternative. It would be great to be able to use Piped instances instead of Invidious ones for playing videos.

Describe the solution you'd like to see implemented
Instead of selecting "Invidious Instance", ability to select either a Invidious or a Piped instance.

Describe alternatives you've considered
N/A

[PrestonN]

I do not believe they provide an open API. Even if they did, they would need to structure the data to be exactly like Invidious. If they didn't then we'd have to do a tremendous amount of work to implement it to the point where the same amount of effort could be used to implement something like PeerTube instead.

Because of these reasons, it seems unlikely that it'll be supported.

[peepo5]

@PrestonN They have an API but it is undocumented as of now
It is better to keep this issue open so we can discuss changes made by the Piped team.

[PrestonN]

My argument still stands where even if they have an API, there's way too much work that would need to be done to support it if it is going to be structured differently to the Invidious API. The amount of effort it would take to support Piped would be similar to if we supported an entirely new platform such as PeerTube. If we're going to be making that effort, I would much prefer that time be spent on actually adding PeerTube support rather than adding another way of accessing YouTube. If there comes a time where Piped did structure their API to be the same as Invidious, then we wouldn't have to do anything towards it anyway.

Either way, there's nothing on our end that's going to be done about it, and there isn't a reason that the issue should stay open because of it.

[peepo5]

Okay.
If they add documentation, and if I have time, I will be the one to add support.

[kubo6472]

fixed link (once more): https://docs.piped.video/docs/api-documentation/

[ChunkyProgrammer]

Piped now has API documentation: https://github.com/TeamPiped/OpenAPI

Reopening this issue as I think this is more possible now that we're decoupling a lot of the api code from the views/components (we want to parse all api data so that they follow the same format => we can make the piped response be the same as invidious/local api)

I don't think this will be added for a while and I'm not sure if anyone on the dev team would want to work on this but if someone else created a PR for it, I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be merged once #3048 is finished.

[Cyanide-1]

honestly i just found this open issue, i would personally love to see this get merged at some point, adding piped api support would allow for access to more servers (aka the ones from piped), i find that a lot of invidious servers for instance are really slow and not really usable (or have api issues), there are a couple of fast ones but few and far between, but there some good piped servers i use on mobile (i use libretube on mobile which uses piped as a backend for api)

i think this would be a great boon to freetube, im fully in support of this getting merged and would love to see it personally

[codenyte]

It would also be great if it was possible to log in to a Piped account

[noraj]

At least, we could have Piped subscription format import (JSON)?

[FXlife]

Hello. I wonder if this problem or rather, this feature request, is still under consideration. Invidious instances are almost nonexistent at the moment (in 2025). Switching to Piped instances or API is, in my humble opinion, the most viable option to allow FreeTube to survive.

I use FreeTube for various personal reasons, but it would help avoid tedious searches to find a functional and suitable Invidious instance.