I have a headless raspberry PI 4 8GB connected to my TV setup with Kodi and the Jellyfin add-on. Now I would like to have a convenient option to watch Youtube in a privacy-friendly way on the TV.
The experience should be similar to Freetube: creating playlists, search videos, follow subscribed channels. I don’t mind running it either directly on the PI or install it on my server.
Thanks for any recommendations of what you folks use!
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If you have a RPi, install Mozillla Firefox, and Ublock. The only way to watch YT without going nuts.
Supertube on a fire stick works ok.
You could try this setup. Create a seperate network for TV with no internet (you might need a seperate rj45 connector on PI), then run microsocks proxy on pi (microsocks is super lightweight, and this will be using your other rj45 or wifi with internet), next install smarttube on TV and add your local proxy. You will need to create an exception in your firewall to allow connections to microsocks and block everything.
This way, nothing on your TV should have internet access other than any app you add that can accept a proxy.
If you don’t care about your TV spying on you, skip all this and just install smarttube on TV and use it.
Note: I just realized pi already has a wifi and an ethernet connection so you won’t need to buy another usb-to-rj45, so use one interface for no-internet-except-microsocks network, and use the other for normal one.
I use the Kodi Invidious Plugin and my own Invidious instance.
If you have an Android TV device, SmartTube is fantastic. It’s highly configurable and blocks ads out of the box
I’m terrified some day it’ll stop working and I’ll have to go back to regular YouTube!
I actually wonder sometimes how it’s survived this long.
There are … alternative methods. Fiddly, you have to roll your own, added frustration… but it could be done. Though I hope I never have to.
OTOH, it’s a bit like hydra - cut one head off, three more appear. Until google fully locks down YouTube (and they might), there will always be wiggle room.
Honestly, I think they know that if they get too annoying, everyone will go elsewhere, so they are boiling the frog slowly. I’d bet Smarttube, Revanced, PipePipe etc are the Zion to YouTube’s Matrix - allowed to exist as a pressure release valves.
I actually wonder sometimes how it’s survived this long
So I’ve been involved with the repo a little (just some basic issue triage and documentation stuff) and all I can say is that Yuliskov has made that project his life’s work. If anything happens to him, we’re all screwed!
Would a Roku work? Forgive my ignorance, not sure if they count as android based
Roku uses a custom OS unfortunately
I have an LG with WebOS which is also not connected to the internet. So that’s unfortunately not an option.
Buy a $20 Android TV box from Walmart and install Smarttube on it.
He wants privacy from YouTube, pretty sure that he doesn’t want Walmart to steal his data either
There is an ATV LineageOS image available for the 2021 Onn for anyone who wants to go that route https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/dopinder/
Walmart doesn’t make the box so more like Google or China.
Nobody makes their own boxes, everything you love to play with either gets designed, fabricated, or packaged in to boards, or assembled, in China.
So tired of the casual racism of “this brand good, but that brand bad, because China.” I know you didn’t mean something malicious by it, but we’ve got to do better.
I also have an LG TV. I bought an external Android TV box (Nvidia Shield) and now primarily use that as the interface.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Plex Brand of media server package RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer
[Thread #82 for this comm, first seen 19th Aug 2026, 23:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
A bit ridiculous, but maybe the SmartTube app via Waydroid?
Not sure if that would operate well on a 4GB Pi.
I suspect you’ll either need to keep the Android System always running in the background and sacrifice some of your RAM or go through a slow cold-boot every time you want to watch YouTube.That being said, privacy friendly? Eh? I guess more than the official App but I don’t think they’re explicitly doing anything for Privacy since their focus is making sure the app keeps working amidst YouTube’s constant changes.
There’s some browser extensions that let you run the YouTube Smart TV UI on your browser but not really private. You get uBlock at best.
The most private option would be a front-end like Invidious, but it currently doesn’t have Keyboard Navigation, so possibly hard to navigate with a Remote Control, you’d need a mouse or similar device.
There’s a feature request for it but devs haven’t gotten around it yet.Maybe you could try to bodge it with a userscript? Idk.
I don’t know if it’s feasible or not, but I was going to recommend the same thing, trying to get smarttube over Waydroid, as the most comfortable big screen, remote controlled experience that is privacy first, allows channel subscriptions, and integrates SponsorBlock right out of the box.
I’ve been using vacuumtube and I quite like it
I run ytdl-sub in my jellyfin. Totally does not fit your bill, but its awesome if you just want to follow a few channels :)
The Piped kodi addon sometimes works, but it’s been so rare I found myself downloading videos and streaming them to Kodi over DLNA most of the time… Not perfect but it works
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I’ll tell you what I use, appreciate that it doesn’t cover your needs (I was more focused on avoiding unskippable ads) and it’s a bit fiddly but it might provide a good starting point.
I also have a RPi 4 8Gb that runs a self-hosted Plex (Jellyfin would work even better arguably). “Playlists” are different Plex libraries.
For subscriptions, or channels where I want every vid, I have a crontab that wakes up once a week, downloads latest vids via yt-dlp, and puts them in the relevant Plex library.
For Discovery or ad-hoc vids, I rely on “real” youtube in my PC, and when I find something I want to watch I just manually share the link with a script in the Pi that will pull it via yt-dlp and put it in yet another “adhoc videos” Plex Library.
It works great for my purposes. A few caveats: There is the usual arms race between yt-dlp and The Formerly Not-Evil Company, so you need to keep updating yt-dlp every week or so. Also, the vids I like are transient, so I delete them after a month or so, but you can choose to archive them differently.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you want more details, I can happily yap about it for hours :D
hat tip
A man of culture.
If Smarttube goes tits up, that was basically my plan.
Archiving wise: the “forbidden resolution” (540p) gets a lot of bang for buck. I think I scoped out something like 3-4yrs of continuous content (playing 3-4hrs a day) would fit in 1TB. It was something stupid like 8,000 x 20 min YouTube vids.
In theory, you could create a seed bank of (say) 500GB of higher quality content, with weekly or monthly scrapes of new stuff with expiry based on views… but that’s how we get into 4AM over a engineering. Again.
Bookmarking this. I am low-key low-priority background-task setting up a Jellyfin with yt-dlp integration somehow and I love this simple brilliant idea, playlist with a cronjob. Same basic principle as Invidious.
I use grayjay on my phone, and casts the videos via fcast.
Also smart tube
Well, the clear answer is Smart tube…but I think you might be talking about downloading and integrating into your media stack?
If so…doesn’t Jellyfin have a plugin for TubeArchivist?
