Hello!
As you may (or may not) know, YouTube in Australia is now requiring ID (real-time video, government-issued ID) as a means of age verification. Without it, I am sadly unable to use SmartTube as previously - saved playlists, search, etc no longer work. Yes, I can do all that signed out…but not signed in. Won’t someone think of the children!
To date, Smarttube has been the best FOSS Youtube big screen replacement for Android TVs… but I’m not comfortable with Google having my photo my ID, so I wanted to create a workaround.
So I did.
SmartTube LOCAL is a (very small) fork of Smarttube beta 35.52, with the following desirable features -
- local profiles (so google doesn’t know need to know who you are / no login needed)
- per-profile subscriptions and playlists (stored locally)
- per-profile password/PIN protection (ditto)
- anonymous search and playback (ditto x2 )
- No fucking youtube log in or auth needed!
Every thing else is stock SmartTube (sponsor block, diff video formats etc). I just ripped out the Google bits.
If that sounds like something that might interest you, please feel free to grab it HERE.
I made it for myself (so, WYSIWYG), so am not accepting PRs etc. I will update it from time to time (as upstream adds useful enhancements or more likely…as YT fucks things up).
AI disclosure, per !selfhosted house-rules
- Design - Assisted
- Implementation - Pair
- Testing - Generated
- Documentation - Human
- Review - Pair
This is a great way to watch stuff while minimizing Google’s ability to tie watch history to personal identifiers.
^ bingo
Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to parse the .zip that Google takeout creates of your activity (playlists, metadata etc) into this. Presently the system is manual and klunky. I’m trying to figure out a clean import of playlist etc. EDIT: done!
Once I have that grokked, I can probably ditch google acct altogether (Youtube was the only reason I kept it, really / kids liked watching old cartoons on it).
Later on…I might add in downloads (like PipePipe does), though with yt-dlp around, that’s bringing coals to Newcastle.
Does this allow viewing restricted videos? Usually those require Google logins to watch.
No, sorry it does not (unless they changed something upstream in 35.52 that allows for that).
This is simply to bypass having to log in in the first place / sync your playlists offline…but if the video is youtube restricted / needs OAuth, then this doesn’t bypass it.
I updated the fork overnight, so now you can download your Google Takeout data as a ZIP, import it, wait about 5 minutes, and voila - all your playlists are available locally. You can add to them locally, obviously, but those changes won’t sync back to YouTube. “Likes” and “Comments” obviously don’t work either.
Sorry, I couldn’t figure out how to do local avatars or progress indicator bar for the import (well, I mean, I could…I just couldn’t be arsed to spend another 4-5hrs doing it, then testing it etc etc).
Enjoy your pirate youtubez, yarr!
EDIT: I’m going to see if I can figure out a way to import subscriptions as well. I think the “easiest” (meaning, least work for me) pathway is to do Google Takeout—>import the ZIP into pipepipe or newpipe (as it has the machinery in place)–>export the cleaned JSON—>Import that into Smarttube LOCAL.
Less things to break doing it this way.
deleted by creator
https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/grayjay/ proprietary :/
Sorry, didn’t check the community before commenting. Was just trying to give an alternative I’ve found success with. Thanks for pointing this out!
Sadly, never had much luck with that on my Android TVs :(
Amazingly, PipePipe almost works perfectly on TV…you just need to figure out a way to fake landscape rotation so that videos begin in fullscreen. I had an idea on that, too, if my fork stops working (though PipePipe UI is delightful 2014)
