• rest in pieces
• It was a good run, 1.5 years. Started as a quickly made addition to the norbot project, and within long the server had to be upgraded several times. Of course YouTube Legal was an inevitability at that point.
• Special thanks to the many people who created plugins and extensions for hooktube, /g/, the five people who donated anonymously, and BitChute for working hard on a real YouTube alternative. HookTube will remain operational in the present state for those who only needed it for performance reasons. See you in the next project.
• July 16: YouTube api features are back but mp4 <video> is replaced with the standard YT video embed. HookTube is now effectively just a light-weight version of youtube and useless to the 90% of you primarily concerned with denying Google data and seeing videos blocked by your governments.
• July 11: HookTube no longer uses YouTube api for anything, and most features (channel page, search, related videos, etc) are gone. No choice. (see july 16)
• June 25: Cyrillic unbanned from search, for now.
• November 16: Front page a lot faster. Theater mode button.
• September 10: Automatic force update on videos with prematurely invalidated stream urls. Fixes 90% of the problem videos of this type. Javascript based so doesn't exist in the embed. VEVO videos are still going to be dodgy, that's another issue altogether.
• September 9: 1) Added support for url parameters end (same as youtube - seconds or XmYs), loop (1 for on, doesn't play well with end on embed), and speed (valid range: 0.01 to 4, doesn't work on embed). Example: https://hooktube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO-An4&start=43&end=47&loop=1&speed=2.
  2) You can now click the button under the video to set looping mode and playback rate options, and optionally make them apply to all videos.
• September 8: Basic implementation of comments.
• September 2-6: Toggle button for looping mode (html5 video only, not YT embed). Player remembers your preferred video volume with a cookie (html5 video only, not YT embed). You can now look up channels with the old YT username format (ex: https://hooktube.com/user/JamesNintendoNerd). 720p is the new default over old 360p when user hasn't specified a preference. Channel names linked to channel in search, etc. Categories (front page).
• September 1: Complete rebuild. Tested on FireFox, IE11, and Brave. Please let me know if you run into any issues.
• August 26: Added a Google API proxy so clients don't transmit data to Google when using search, etc.
• August 21: Basic channel pages and search added.
• August 11: Video pages now show related videos unless you have disabled javascript or blocked JSON queries to www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search (see august 26).
• June 4: All detected audio and video formats/streams are now exposed, including esoteric stuff like 3d video if present. Keep in mind they're not guaranteed to work on all videos, YouTube can be weird.
• May 31: HookTube video links are now automatically embedded on Twitter.
• May 29: url parameters t and start are now obeyed just like default YouTube.

Why no 1080p+?

All available resolutions are available in the Download button, but the ones above 720p are without audio (comes separatively as AAC audio streams). I would have to build a custom player that combines and accurately syncs multiple streams in order to play them for you and that's not a priority right now.

Privacy Policy

The HookTube player uses cookies to remember your preferred settings. HookTube doesn't collect data beyond normal server request logs, and they are only used for the generation of traffic statistics.

Third party services: CloudFlare (DNS), YouTube (thumbnails and the video streams).