[Feature request] Add option to sign in to Google account (as workaround for "Please sign in" blocking playback)

[retrocaster]

I would like to suggest adding an optional ability to sign in to a Google account, purely as a way to get around the "Please sign in" errors which are now occurring for every video I try to play despite hosting my own private instance on a residential ip address.

I realize this goes against the privacy goal of Invidious, but that's not why I use Invidious. I use Invidious because it allows me to play ad free Youtube on my Apple TV via Yattee. I don't care if Google is tracking what I watch and I suspect there are other users that feel the same.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Countless bugs have been filed on the issue of Youtube blocking playback. For example, #4975

Describe the solution you'd like
Add an optional way to log into a Google account using username/password

Thanks for any consideration!

[SamantazFox]

We removed the "login with Google" feature in #3893 because their 2FA process and account protection is way too complicated for us to follow.

However, you can connect to the official website, then copy your sessions cookies and put them in your instance's config.yml:

invidious/config/config.example.yml

Lines 157 to 163 in 53e8a5d

	##
	## Additional cookies to be sent when requesting the youtube API.
	##
	## Accepted values: a string in the format "name1=value1; name2=value2..."
	## Default: <none>
	##
	#cookies:

[unixfox]

However, you can connect to the official website, then copy your sessions cookies and put them in your instance's config.yml:

There are more things to do in order to have this working. People explained what in the private matrix room.

We removed the "login with Google" feature in #3893 because their 2FA process and account protection is way too complicated for us to follow.

Youtube oauth2 makes this quite easy, in fact.

[unixfox]

This will be considered as an option in a future change. For now there are unofficial ways getting shared on matrix to get this working, but we have no plans to share them here since this is not the correct way to logging into a google account. Doing it the way being shared on matrix can result in the logging not working after a few days and requiring to logging every week for example.

Anyway we want to make it clear, this is not the ultimate solution. People on yt-dlp for example have said that they were getting their google account banned pretty quickly by using it on yt-dlp.