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YouTube

Fathom includes a complete YouTube client, off by default. Turn it on in Settings. It uses no account and shows no ads, and your subscriptions, playlists, and history stay on your device. Nothing is sent to YouTube.

What it includes

  • Search across videos, channels, and playlists.
  • Subscriptions and feed groups, plus your own local playlists.
  • Comments, captions, a play queue, and theater mode.
  • Chapters, the way YouTube shows them: the current chapter's title sits in a pill beside the volume control and opens the chapter list, the seek bar splits into a segment per chapter, and hovering or dragging along the bar names the chapter you would land in.
  • Foldable phones: in tabletop (half-folded with the crease across the screen) the video takes the standing half, with the details, comments, and Up Next on the flat half. Fullscreen splits the same way.
  • Shorts: a vertical swipe pager through a channel's Shorts, with comments, a scrubbable progress bar, and portrait fullscreen.
  • Background audio: keep listening with the screen off, with lock-screen and Android Auto controls, a queue, shuffle, and repeat.
  • The same player as the rest of Fathom: one control bar, seek bar, speed control, and keyboard shortcuts.

Cleaner viewing

  • SponsorBlock skips sponsor, intro, and self-promo segments.
  • DeArrow replaces clickbait titles and thumbnails with community-sourced ones.
  • Return YouTube Dislike brings back the dislike count.

Each is toggled in Settings.

Downloads

Download videos for offline viewing:

  • Video as MP4 or MKV.
  • Audio as M4A or MP3.
  • At a quality and to a folder you choose.

On Android 11 and newer, finished downloads go to Movies/Fathom (video) and Music/Fathom (audio) unless you pick another folder, so they show up in the Files app, your gallery and other players. Long-press a download for Open With and Share. A folder outside the phone's main storage, such as an SD card, falls back to those defaults.

Install ffmpeg on Linux

YouTube serves anything above 360p, and for more and more videos everything, as separate video and audio streams, which ffmpeg merges. Without it you can download audio, and a 360p MP4 only where YouTube still offers one. Android has ffmpeg built in, and the Windows download includes it from 0.13.1 on.

Playback details

The Playback Info overlay works here too. On YouTube its Play method line shows whether you are getting a high-quality adaptive (DASH) stream (separate video and audio) or the muxed fallback.