Fjernsyn is a desktop YouTube client for Windows, macOS and Linux. It talks to YouTube directly, or through an Invidious instance, and keeps your subscriptions, profiles, history and playlists in files on your own machine. There is no account and no login.
I built it around how I watch. Everything my subscriptions publish goes into one stream, and I can keep a few hundred channels sorted into profiles. Playback recovers when YouTube stops trusting a session, comments load as I scroll, and the download button hands the video to yt-dlp.
Fjernsyn is Norwegian (and Danish) for television, literally "far-sight", tele-vision translated word for word.
Every push to main is a release, built for Windows, macOS and Linux. Download the file for your platform from the latest release: an installer or a portable build for Windows, a disk image for macOS, and an AppImage, a portable archive or a package (deb, rpm, pacman) for Linux. The builds are unsigned, so Windows and macOS warn you the first time you open them.
Fjernsyn started as a fork of FreeTube, and most of it still comes from there: the application programming interface (API) layer, the player, the settings and nearly all of the interface. I merge FreeTube's development branch as it moves, bringing its fixes and features into Fjernsyn alongside my own changes. Credit for FreeTube belongs to its contributors.
The FreeTube team has no part in Fjernsyn, so please do not take problems with it to them. If you want FreeTube itself, go to the official project, with downloads at freetubeapp.io.
The version numbers started again at 0.0.1 when it got its own name.
Fjernsyn installs beside FreeTube and keeps its data in a folder of its own, so the two run on one machine without touching each other's data.
On its first launch it copies what it finds in FreeTube's data folder: subscriptions, profiles, history, playlists and settings, along with any yt-dlp, ffmpeg and Deno installed there. FreeTube keeps its original data, and from then on the two apps keep their data apart. The Watch Later playlist becomes Fjernsyn's Later list (see Later).
Flatpak and Snap installations of FreeTube keep their data inside a sandbox, where Fjernsyn does not look. For those, export from FreeTube and import into Fjernsyn.
Exports are named fjernsyn-*.db and use FreeTube's format, so each app imports the other's.
Fjernsyn opens its own fjernsyn:// links and the freetube:// links that browser redirect extensions send. Both apps claim freetube:// links each time they start, so the one started last gets them. Switch this off in Fjernsyn's general settings to leave them to FreeTube.
Builds of this repository from before the rename were called FreeTube. Windows sees Fjernsyn as a different app, so it installs beside such a build, and the old one has to be uninstalled by hand.
YouTube's server-side adaptive bitrate (SABR) streaming stops trusting a playback session now and then. Fjernsyn retries, gets fresh credentials and rebuilds the manifest, reloading the page only when it has run out of options. All player reloads go through this recovery process. The player shows "Reconnecting to YouTube" while it works.
Fjernsyn retries failed proof of origin (PO) token requests and handles YouTube's captcha by taking the challenge from the homepage. It recovers live streams that come back without a web manifest, and unreadable metadata does not stop playback. The error screen says what failed and offers Try Again.
The player uses shaka-player 5.2 for a fix the 5.1 line never got: request headers stay isolated across retry attempts, which every SABR request depends on. Playback speed has a slider with half-step presets beside it. Keyboard shortcuts use the configured rate interval.
Some videos are inaudible at 100% volume. Fjernsyn's volume bar goes up to a configurable ceiling of 1000% (+20 decibels).
Optional loudness normalisation corrects each video for how loud it was mastered (YouTube provides this information), which also turns very loud videos down. It is off by default, but I have it on.
A small pin on the control bar keeps the player's controls from fading, and the choice sticks between videos.
A curve above the seek bar shows which parts of the video people replay the most. YouTube calls it "most replayed" and only has it for videos with enough views, so new uploads show none. It comes and goes with the controls, in a darker shade of the seek bar's colour, and leaves the bar itself clear, so SponsorBlock segments and chapters stay visible. Switch it off with Show Most Replayed in the player settings.
Some channels read their sponsors as part of the show. You can stop SponsorBlock skipping on a channel, for those where the ads are actually fun and cool. Its segments are still marked on the seek bar. The switch is on the channel page, on the video you are watching and in a video's menu. SponsorBlock settings list the channels you have changed, and you can add a channel there by typing the name of one you subscribe to, or remove any of them.
Videos, shorts, live streams and posts share one feed. A row of filters turns each kind on and off. Every refresh fetches all four, so switching one on is instant.
On refresh, the subscription list keeps its old entries while the new ones come in.
If one service reports a channel as terminated, Fjernsyn checks an independent endpoint. Without confirmation, it keeps the cached data and retries later. If too many channels come back as terminated in one refresh, it stops accepting those reports and checking them. During an outage this saves several hundred pointless requests.
Scheduled premieres and live streams are in a shelf over the other videos, collapsed by default, and "Hide Upcoming Premieres" does what it says.
A playlist makes a poor queue. Things I mean to watch pile up in the order I found them, nothing leaves when I have watched it, and nothing tells me that a stream I wanted to catch has started. The Later list, behind the Later button in the top bar, is a queue with an order of its own, and it starts streams when they go live.
The clock on a video card, or on the watch page, puts the video at the top of the list, and a second click takes it off. Put the list in any order with the arrows on each row, or drag a row by its grip. A video leaves the list when you watch it to the end; stopping halfway, or only opening it, leaves it where it was.
An upcoming stream or premiere can be armed with its calendar button: on its card in the Upcoming shelf, on its watch page, or on its row in the Later list. Armed items have their own section at the top of the Later page, soonest first, each with its time and its state:
- Waiting, until two minutes before the stated time.
- Checking, from then until three hours after it.
- Did not start, after that. It is still checked once an hour, until you remove it.
- Live now, when it went live and you did not answer (below).
Fjernsyn asks YouTube about each armed item once when it starts, once an hour, and every minute while it is Checking. An item fires when YouTube says it is live, whatever time was stated, so a stream that starts late is caught when it actually starts, and a moved time is followed. When it goes live:
- If you are watching nothing, a notice counts down ten seconds and then opens the stream. Watch now goes at once, and Cancel stops it.
- If you are watching a video, a notice appears on the player, in full window and fullscreen too, and stays until you pick Watch now or Dismiss. Several stack. Leave the watch page without answering and the item stays in the list as Live now, and does not interrupt you again until the next start; click it to watch.
- If you are waiting on its own watch page, the page reloads into the stream.
- If the window is minimised or in the tray, you get a desktop notification, and nothing plays. Clicking it brings the window back and opens the stream. Where the system shows no notification, a toast says what went live, and the item waits at the top of the list.
Going to a stream takes it off the list. Cancel, Dismiss, the desktop notification, and a stream that ended before Fjernsyn saw it live all leave the item at the top of the list with its alarm off, and its calendar button arms it again.
The checks are a single small request each, made only by the first window you opened, and only when Fjernsyn talks to YouTube directly; through Invidious nothing is checked. They are kept out of the request budget the subscription refresh uses, so a refresh does not hold them up.
On Windows the desktop notification needs the installed build. I have not seen whether the portable one shows it.
The Later list has its own export and import in Data settings.
With a few hundred subscriptions, a checkbox list of every channel is unusable, and my profiles went stale. The Channels page is a place to sort channels into profiles.
Every profile is a bubble along the top. Click one to open its column. Open as many as you like; the columns scroll sideways once they do not fit. Each window keeps its own open columns, so you can work on different profiles in different windows.
Channels in no profile sit in an Unassigned column on the left, which goes away once it is empty. The goal is every channel in a profile.
Drag a channel to another column to move it, or hold Ctrl to copy it. Drop it on a bubble to file it without opening the column, or on the trash to unsubscribe, after confirmation. The Move to and Copy to menus do the same with the keyboard.
Click to select, Shift-click for a range, or use Select all on a column; dragging any selected channel moves the whole selection. The search box narrows every column at once, and each bubble shows how many of its channels match.
A channel in more than one profile sorts to the top of each column it is in. When two of those columns are open, both copies share a colour, so the pairs are easy to spot. Right-click one to remove it from that profile, or keep it there and remove it from all the others.
Double-click a channel to visit its page. Click a column's heading to make that profile active.
Click New profile at the end of the strip and type its name there. New profiles go at the end. Right-click a bubble to rename it, change its colour or picture, or remove it. Removing a profile leaves its channels subscribed, and those in no other profile go back to Unassigned.
A profile's picture takes the place of its initial everywhere the profile is shown: a symbol or emoji you type or paste, any of Font Awesome's solid icons, or an image from a file on your machine, cropped to a square. The profile settings can set it too. Pictures are kept with the settings, so a settings export carries them and a profile export does not.
Drag bubbles to put profiles in your own order, or move the focused one with Ctrl+Shift+Left and Right. Every profile list in the app follows that order. A bar shows where a dragged bubble will land. Chromium sometimes loses drops, so Fjernsyn catches those itself.
Suggest profiles replaces the profile columns with proposed ones, drawn with dashed edges:
- Unassigned channels that fit one of your profiles.
- Channels that fit another profile clearly better than their own, badged with where they are now.
- Groups for a new profile, by YouTube category or by a shared tag.
Suggestions use the tags from channel pages fetched during a refresh and the categories of videos you watch. They need no extra requests and get better as you go. Hover a channel to see why it is there.
Nothing changes until you act:
- Tick a channel to file it.
- Click its cross to dismiss the suggestion for that channel permanently.
- Tick a heading to accept the whole suggestion.
- Drop a channel on a suggestion to include it when you accept the rest.
Each column, including Unassigned, has a Probe button for channels the app knows too little about. It checks three recent videos from each channel, one request at a time, and saves what it finds with the channel. It runs in the background as suggestions fill in, never during subscription refreshes, and stops the moment YouTube pushes back.
Probing a second column queues it behind the first. Press Probe again after a stop to pick up where it left off.
Set the default profile in the profile settings.
Explore shows every trending category at once. The categories come from what YouTube's own guide offers here, plus the categories it serves without mentioning them.
You can change region on the page, and the last four you looked at stay a click away. Pinned regions stay there and do not count towards the four, so you can pin the places you care about and still wander.
YouTube's recommendations find the next thing you will click. A better source of good videos are what people share and "upvote" on different communities, like lemmy or hacker-news. The "communities" section gathers such links. To get users started a few communities are included by default: HackerTube, Andrej Karpathy's index of the videos Hacker News has recommended over the years, and some larger Lemmy communities. You can add your own sources on the "sources" -section (only Lemmy supported for now).
HackerTube's data is from HackerTube and the open-index/hacker-news dataset, under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0.
Searching YouTube turns up a lot of videos made wholly by AI. Many are poor, and some are wrong in ways that are dangerous or unhealthy. YouTube lets creators label the videos ("Made with AI" on the watch page), but lists do not expose it; search results, channel pages and related videos look like any other.
Fjernsyn checks the videos when it lists them: On search results, subscriptions, a channel's pages and the videos beside the one playing, each video is checked the first time its card comes on screen, and the answer is stored. A labelled video gets a chartreuse AI marker on its card. Auto-dubbed videos are made by people, with machine-translated audio, and stay unmarked. Each check is a small request, sharing the subscription refresh's request budget, so the markers arrive a few seconds after the cards.
Creators who do not declare AI usage are not covered by this, so there is a way to manually mark their channels: Mark Channel as AI, in a video's menu, puts the marker on every video from that channel without checking any of them.
An button at the top right of the walls with videos lets the user switch between showing and hiding the marked videos. It is the same setting as Hide Videos Made with AI in the Distraction Free settings, which also lists the channels you have marked. You have to find a channel there to unmark it channel there once its videos are hidden.
Videos without a made-with-AI declaration, from channels you have not marked, are not caught. Maybe in the future.
Navigation is in the top bar, which gives the page the full width of the window. The control row stays on screen while you scroll.
The window has no title bar. To move it, hold the mouse button still for a moment anywhere that does not already drag, then move the mouse. The borders still resize it, and the system's own shortcuts (Win+arrows, F11, Alt+F4) work as before. Switch Frameless Window off in the theme settings to get the title bar back, after a restart. On Linux under Wayland an app cannot move its own window, so there the title bar stays.
Every grid of cards is a wall: large thumbnails packed edge to edge across the whole window, with the text laid over the bottom of each. I use it with full window as the default viewing mode, so the app mostly gets out of the way.
Hover over a video card to show a tick beside the playlist buttons. Click it to mark the video as watched, or remove it from history if it is already there. I removed the external player button from the cards because I never used it.
With the local API, comments load as you scroll. Each thread opens with its first few replies and a button to load the rest. Only visible threads load, so a page of twenty threads does not fire twenty requests at once. With Invidious, you click to load comments.
You cannot post comments, since there is no login.
The download button hands the video to yt-dlp. FreeTube removed downloads early in 2026; Fjernsyn brings them back. Switch it on in the yt-dlp section of the settings (desktop builds only).
If yt-dlp, ffmpeg or Deno is missing, the first click offers to install what is needed before downloading. You can also install them from settings, or update yt-dlp there when YouTube downloads start failing.
A click downloads the best quality available. Right-click or hold to choose a lower quality, or just the audio. The downloads indicator in the top bar shows progress, time left and where the file is going. You can cancel a download there and resume it later. Once it finishes, the button becomes Show in folder.
PeerTube is video hosting spread across thousands of independent servers, called instances. Fjernsyn can watch, follow and search PeerTube videos beside YouTube's, with no account. It is experimental and off by default: switch it on under Experimental in the settings.
Paste a PeerTube video or channel link into the search bar, or a channel handle such as blender_studio@video.blender.org, and it opens in Fjernsyn. fjernsyn:// links work the same way.
The watch page plays the instance's own streams at the qualities it offers, with captions, chapters and the storyboard on the seek bar. Audio only is there when the instance serves the sound on its own. Live streams play, and a scheduled one says when it starts if the instance gives a time. Comments load, and their replies on request. The download button fetches the instance's own files, and the external player button works as it does for YouTube.
Subscribed PeerTube channels share the feed with YouTube's, sorted by when each video was published, and sit in profiles and on the Channels page like any other channel. PeerTube videos go into history and your playlists, and resume where you left off. A playlist does not yet play on through them, and a channel's own PeerTube playlists open in the browser. Importing NewPipe subscriptions brings their PeerTube channels along, and an account in the list becomes all of its channels. The NewPipe export keeps them; the YouTube formats leave them out.
Search goes through SepiaSearch, an index of many instances, by default. SepiaSearch does not moderate what it indexes. In the PeerTube settings you can point search at another index or your own instance, and choose whether to show not safe for work (NSFW) videos. The search bar still searches YouTube, and a Search PeerTube link beside the results runs the same search on PeerTube. Kind of hard to see, but this is very early yet.g
There is no login yet, so you cannot comment, rate or subscribe with an account on an instance, and private videos stay closed.
I spend no effort on translations. They come from FreeTube, so picking another language translates what the two apps share and leaves what Fjernsyn adds in English. Some translated text will probably say FreeTube where it means this app.
Fjernsyn is a personal project. The repository takes no issues, and I am not looking for help with it. The code is here to use, study, change and share, as the licence allows, and a devcontainer is included for working on it. Problems with FreeTube itself belong with the FreeTube project.
I am not looking for donations. If you want to donate, support the FreeTube project. They are awesome. The address below is theirs, for keeping their website running and for future code signing costs. I have no connection to it.
- Bitcoin Address:
1Lih7Ho5gnxb1CwPD4o59ss78pwo2T91eS
Tip
If you are using the Invidious API, donate to the instance you use. You can also donate to the Invidious team or the Local API developer.
Fjernsyn is Free Software: you can use, study, share and improve it at your will. Specifically you can redistribute and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.