Description of App
Vinegar is a Safari extension that replaces the YouTube player with a minimal HTML video tag.
It removes ads, restores picture-in-picture, and keeps videos playing in the background.
Note: The "can read information from webpages" text in the permission section is just unfortunate wording. Vinegar needs access to the web page to find the YouTube player and replace it. It's not doing anything creepy!
(By the way, check out Vinegar's companion app, Baking Soda. It's basically a less powerful version of Vinegar, but it works on all websites other than YouTube.)
Comments
Can't use with IOS 14
Just a head's up. You will be unable to download this app if you are running IOS 14.
Play, pause, skip ahead and other playbackcontrols
Hi there! Thanks for posting this great extention! :)
I bought this one and tested it out, and man, it's a blast to just watch everything without adds!
However, I'm having problems using playback controls in the format the extention presents the video in. I can't swipe up or down on the time progress bar to skip back or forward. It doesn't work to double-tap and hold on it and then drag finger left or right either.
I found a button for "skip ahead 10 seconds" and the same for backwards, but the buttons doesn't seem to do anything.
Play/pause button doesn't work for me either. So if I lock the screen during playback, the video stops, which I actually didn't think it would do since this extention should enable picture in picture mode for youtube videos. Anyways, when unlocking the screen again, I want to start the playback from the current possition again, but there's no way for me to get the video started again. Only way is to refresh the page and start playback from the top again.
Same happens when I get a phonecall in the midle of the video, which of course pauses the playback. I then can't resume playback again after the call has ended.
So all in all, it's great to start youtube videos without the dreadful adds all the time, but I'm really not sure if this benefit outways the drawback of having no access to playback controls...
Do you have any ideas of what I'm missing here? Cause I'm sure that I'm missing some crusial element here :)
And I have to mention that I'm currently on the latest dev beta of iOS 15.4, so it might just be that this extention wont work exactly as it should on this beta.
Full screen
I typically use “enter full screen” from the VoiceOver rotor when focus is on the video. The resulting screen provides a better experience in my opinion, and also has the controls behave more as expected.
My guess is that the issues with the playback scrubber are with iOS rather than Vinegar itself, , as the extension supposedly simply changes how the video file is recognised and handled by iOS. I don't believe that it is adding or using its own media player.
I could be wrong though 😕
Also on mac
Just noticed, it's also on mac which is fantastic. If only they had it for apple TV, but guess we can't have it all.
Enable Full Screen
I tried this out and found it great if I don’t need to use the controls. It will not keep its focus on the button to go to full screen so that I can , hopefully, have better access to the controls. Scruffy Ted’s suggestion to enable full screen through the rotor sounds great, but how does one enable that option in the rotor? I am using this on my iPad and do not see this option.