Invidious
| Invidious | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Original author | Omar Roth |
| Developers | Samantaz Fox, unixfox, Matthew McGarvey |
| Release | August 13, 2018 |
| Stable release | 2.20260804.0 
/ 5 August 2026 |
| Written in | Crystal, HTML, JavaScript |
| Type | Frontend |
| License | AGPLv3 |
| Website | invidious |
| Repository | Mirror from GitHub: gitea |
Invidious is a free and open-source alternative frontend to YouTube. It is available as a Docker container, or from the GitHub master branch. It is intended to be used as a lightweight and "privacy-respecting" alternative to the official YouTube website. Many privacy preserving redirecting software as well as YouTube clients use Invidious instances.
Invidious does not use the official YouTube API but scrapes the website for video and metadata such as likes and views. This is done intentionally to decrease the amount of data shared with Google, but YouTube can still see a user's IP address. The web-scraping tool is called the Invidious Developer API. It is also partially used in the free and open-source app, Yattee.