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
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.