I have a headless raspberry PI 4 8GB connected to my TV setup with Kodi and the Jellyfin add-on. Now I would like to have a convenient option to watch Youtube in a privacy-friendly way on the TV.
The experience should be similar to Freetube: creating playlists, search videos, follow subscribed channels. I don’t mind running it either directly on the PI or install it on my server.
Thanks for any recommendations of what you folks use!
I’ll tell you what I use, appreciate that it doesn’t cover your needs (I was more focused on avoiding unskippable ads) and it’s a bit fiddly but it might provide a good starting point.
I also have a RPi 4 8Gb that runs a self-hosted Plex (Jellyfin would work even better arguably). “Playlists” are different Plex libraries.
For subscriptions, or channels where I want every vid, I have a crontab that wakes up once a week, downloads latest vids via yt-dlp, and puts them in the relevant Plex library.
For Discovery or ad-hoc vids, I rely on “real” youtube in my PC, and when I find something I want to watch I just manually share the link with a script in the Pi that will pull it via yt-dlp and put it in yet another “adhoc videos” Plex Library.
It works great for my purposes. A few caveats: There is the usual arms race between yt-dlp and The Formerly Not-Evil Company, so you need to keep updating yt-dlp every week or so. Also, the vids I like are transient, so I delete them after a month or so, but you can choose to archive them differently.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you want more details, I can happily yap about it for hours :D
hat tip
A man of culture.
If Smarttube goes tits up, that was basically my plan.
Archiving wise: the “forbidden resolution” (540p) gets a lot of bang for buck. I think I scoped out something like 3-4yrs of continuous content (playing 3-4hrs a day) would fit in 1TB. It was something stupid like 8,000 x 20 min YouTube vids.
In theory, you could create a seed bank of (say) 500GB of higher quality content, with weekly or monthly scrapes of new stuff with expiry based on views… but that’s how we get into 4AM over a engineering. Again.
Bookmarking this. I am low-key low-priority background-task setting up a Jellyfin with yt-dlp integration somehow and I love this simple brilliant idea, playlist with a cronjob. Same basic principle as Invidious.