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
^ 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.