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.

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)

^ 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.

I like Degoog and 4get.

https://github.com/degoog-org/degoog

https://git.lolcat.ca/lolcat/4get

Thanks for that. I’ve been meaning to (re) disable Google Play services. I have a few older phones too that never had it to begin with. I wonder how/if Aurora Store will be impacted. Presumably, if you don’t have Google Play Services functioning, you don’t get the poison pill. But…given that Big Evil likes to just … do shit (cf the recent 4GB forced ingestion of their LLM with Chrome) I dunno.

In any case, step 1 is probably nuking that.

Cool. So what happens if I run a version of Android that doesn’t inherit Google security theater cruft? That is to say…what if the user simply…does not…upgrade the Android version to be affected by this (eg: uses an old phone or blocks OS version update?).

My phone is going on 7yrs old. Perfectly happy with it. When it breaks, I will get a phone of the same era (2nd hand or new-old stock) or investigate other options.

So, it seems to me, the winning move is not to play the game (in any one of 100 diff ways).

Or am I missing something here? Is there something that will prevent older tech from working? Because if so, I am happy to YOLO my phone and switch to a dumbphone if I have to.