TV-friendly YouTube frontend (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 month ago by retrieval4558@mander.xyz to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Hi all,

I'm building a media center PC and am looking for a tv-controller friendly UI for YouTube. My best case scenario is basically Smarttube as is available on Android TVs. It is a perfect app, but I believe it's not attainable on desktop.

I'm willing to use either Windows or Linux, and have a moderate level of competence in the latter.

I'd prefer that it function well with Kodi. Is the Kodi YouTube plugin any good? Another option I'd like to explore is Freetube or Invidious, but a surface level amount of research hasn't shown me any TV-like UIs.

Previously, I've used a spoofed user agent to trigger YouTube's native TV UI, but it's pretty shit and I'd prefer to not go there directly in any case.

Any insight is appreciated, even if it's a suggestion to post this to another community. Thanks in advance.

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[-] drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The best YouTube TV app for desktops is YouTube TV.

Look up PS4 Pro Leanback UserAgent and I recommend using that with Chrome because Firefox has a little bit of bugs. If you use it as a web app it works pretty well. The one caveat is you cannot exit out of it without enabling a developer flying in Chrome, without that flag you need to use alt + f4.

You want to use a web app or kiosk mode, specifically because resolution that you get in video is determined by the window size at startup, so if you have a 4K display, it needs to be full screen at start or else you will not get 4K video. Playback, you'll only get 1440p.

Otherwise, just full screen it, then refresh.

I personally have found that the kodi plugin is quite frankly not very good.