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!
A bit ridiculous, but maybe the SmartTube app via Waydroid?
Not sure if that would operate well on a 4GB Pi.
I suspect you’ll either need to keep the Android System always running in the background and sacrifice some of your RAM or go through a slow cold-boot every time you want to watch YouTube.
That being said, privacy friendly? Eh? I guess more than the official App but I don’t think they’re explicitly doing anything for Privacy since their focus is making sure the app keeps working amidst YouTube’s constant changes.
There’s some browser extensions that let you run the YouTube Smart TV UI on your browser but not really private. You get uBlock at best.
The most private option would be a front-end like Invidious, but it currently doesn’t have Keyboard Navigation, so possibly hard to navigate with a Remote Control, you’d need a mouse or similar device.
There’s a feature request for it but devs haven’t gotten around it yet.
Maybe you could try to bodge it with a userscript? Idk.
I don’t know if it’s feasible or not, but I was going to recommend the same thing, trying to get smarttube over Waydroid, as the most comfortable big screen, remote controlled experience that is privacy first, allows channel subscriptions, and integrates SponsorBlock right out of the box.