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
Postscript:
Like many, I prefer having an offline cache of YouTube videos, because things disappear, channels get taken down etc.
Back-of-the-envelope maths suggests something in the order of 1TB could comfortably hold ~1,500 720p videos averaging around 20 minutes. That’s a pretty decent little seed library, without fossilising the whole thing into YouTube2ZIM/Kiwix.
A lot of self-hosters use TubeArchivist, or dump downloaded videos into Plex/Jellyfin, but I’ve never found either approach particularly satisfying.
So, I’m going to see whether I can make my SmartTube fork also consume actual offline-downloaded YouTube videos as first-class content.
That way, you could simply feed it downloads produced by something like ytdl-sub.
If there’s interest in that, please upvote / say so.