Greasy Fork

"Old youtube" now broken apparently

So it seems that "old youtube" finally got removed by freaking google, leaving us all stuck with this horrible new soulless layout. I really hope you do manage to bring the classic design back once again, because your script is the ONLY thing making youtube usable these days!

• Best regards

The only way to get the good layout is to install a user-agent switcher extension. Make a rule for youtube only, and set it to Googlebot.

Another option is to use a useragent for youtube disguising as firefox 42 (I just opened a new topic with simple instructions)

I've just released a Beta for the new Youtube after a lot of work, please check it out (link in description). Thanks for sticking around especially those who have been using RSD/BWP for years!

Support for New Youtube is now in Right Side Description, just check for updates if your script manager hasn't automatically updated it. Old Youtube is still supported too until Youtube kills that version of the site.

First: Takato: You're an absolute HERO for this script project.

Second: Hey. I've got a few good news, just passing this along:
Someone has a prototype/proof of concept 'old css style' webpage replacement/extension scraped from archive.org, and is asking for help: not sure if it works, but there's some potential here. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/i0gabf/idea_of_old_design_fix/

Lastly, a personal request: Takato, would you be willing to update Yays! (yet another youtube script) IT hasn't been touched for a long time, but thanks to your hard work was working as recently as last week. It basically goes hand in hand with your script and i'd love to see it brought back and integrated.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/593-yays-yet-another-youtube-script
http://eugenox.appspot.com/script/yays
https://github.com/eugenox/yays

Again, thanks for betterfying my youtube experience for upwards of 8 years.

Hey thanks for the feedback, it's always great to know that people are enjoying the script and still use it!

I'm hoping that the page replications of that extension on Reddit can be merged with the main Good Old Youtube, like already being done for the Homepage. If they're able to replicate the Watch page once Youtube deletes Old Youtube I'll have to make sure RSD works properly with it. I should probably put a link to the extension on the RSD script page because the redirect method works perfectly with RSD right now to get Old Youtube.


At the moment I'm not picking up new projects but if I can figure out lightweight ways to add new features that aren't going to break easily on New Youtube I'll look into them. It looks like Yays has three main features, two are now supported by Youtube by default (select the quality or select auto and it should remember, and it remembers if you're in theatre mode or not). The only Yays feature Youtube doesn't have is preventing autoplay but you can do this with your browser by setting the autoplay permission for Youtube (instructions for Firefox, other browsers should be similar). The buffering setting in Yays won't work and probably hasn't worked for a few years due to Youtube changing how the video files work.

One thing I do want to add to RSD is an option to make the physical size of the videos smaller to match Old Youtube. The problem is the control bar and scrubber stay the wrong size and I haven't figured out how to fix that yet. It will be optional if I add it, for people who are happy with the current sizes on New Youtube.

Dang, I wasn't sure I'd get a response! Thanks for speaking up!

I think it has to do with the player settings: My kitbash was 'good old youtube' + yays + your script, and the player resizing was working properly on a chrome install. If I had to take an amateur-ish guess, there's CSS that locks/controls the new player (otherwise the old page wouldn't work in 2020?) or its an interface thing otherwise.

Hm. I was an avid AUTO START setting user - which would make videos load, buffer, but not start unless the tab was focused - and that never seemed to stop working for me. Not sure if that helps.

But again, thank you for keeping it working: Google is doing everything to break backwards compatability.

I hadn't done any player resizing on Old Youtube in RSD so it hadn't come up as an issue yet, but New Youtube is using some aggressive deep javascript that completely ignores the CSS for sizing some interactive elements like the scrubber bar click/drag functionality. I can resize the video but you wouldn't be able to control it properly and that's not a good result. I think it's going to be practically impossible to resize the player without a browser extension hooking into things that userscripts can't access. If any extension developers are reading, please try calculateNormalPlayerSize_() on ytd-watch-flexy (see notes) and feel free to advertise it here if you release an extension with a smaller player. Or if anyone is aware of an extension or script that resizes the player while keeping the scrubber fully functional please post a link.

Buffering should only buffer up to a certain point due to the DASH playback used on all quality settings except 720p and 360p and those will probably go DASH soon too. Not starting unless the tab is focused is how it is working by default (no script needed!) in Firefox and Vivaldi and should work the same in Chrome.

iridium resizes the video properly to a 16:9 ratio. I have some more css added to change the size, so it doesn't go too wide.

The problem with that script is the auto-start playing video control, it's broken, so it's not possible to start playing a video until page is reloaded.

You are right, Iridium is already doing the same override concept I attempted but couldn't get access to the object. Thanks for the find! It looks like Iridium is actually injecting a lot of itself into the page rather than acting as a userscript and that might be why it works, so I'll try injecting my concept too.

Iridium is just Youtube+, but for the material design albeit with not as many features.
I'm using it because there isn't any other script that has as many of the useful features youtube+ has in one place. I dont want to install 5 scripts to do a certain thing, and at the end they might not play well together.

If anyone could actually fix the autoplay video in iridium would be great, even completely removing it is fine too (I dont like to have to click play when a video is opened). I asked the creator of that script to do it, but he is a stubborn dude who's decided to only support the firefox extension with only 2 features.

I am very happy to announce that RSD will soon have a setting to make videos use the same size as they do on Old Youtube! This isn't just an aspect ratio fix, but a full restoration of Old Youtube's sizes - No more massive videos taking up your window. I hope to release the update tomorrow.

No code from Iridium was used but I hadn't thought of injecting the code into the page itself (I had assumed userscripts had the full access that the page does and didn't need injection) until seeing that Iridium injected an aspect ratio fix, so thank you to ParticleCore for that and for q1k for pointing me in that direction.

If anyone wants to try out the smaller player size, the update is out now and you can find the setting in the settings panel. It is off by default. The size matches Old Youtube.

If you're using Old Youtube, the latest update to Right Side Description has made some improvements to performance and has split the 'retro mode' toggle into 'retro style' and 'retro player' settings so you can choose how you want it, just like on New Youtube. The settings have moved to the Youtube header to match New Youtube.

Please post a topic if you have any problems or errors.

can you make a separate script with the smaller player size only? please, please!

If you disable all the other settings, what's left that you don't want included? Is it the description movement?

Are there others would would be interested in a standalone script for just the player size change setting?