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 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 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.
I also have an LG TV. I bought an external Android TV box (Nvidia Shield) and now primarily use that as the interface.
Would a Roku work? Forgive my ignorance, not sure if they count as android based
Roku uses a custom OS unfortunately
Please nobody buy roku. It’s become full of ads and monitoring.
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
Piggyback to share what I’ve tried:
YouTube plugin for Kodi on rpi 4B - great when it worked, often had breaking bugs for a long time (cat and mouse development), somewhat difficult to keep up to date. Had to manually install releases from github.
“Play on Kodi” add on, which uses ytdlp to download and send the video. Fiddly, could never get it to work seamlessly or smoothly.
YouTube in firefox on RaspberryOS, with keyboard and mouse: firefox was too heavy for the rpi to work consistently.
I eventually bought one of those beelink mini pcs, which has enough power to run Firefox, to watch YouTube. It doesn’t have CEC built in, which is a huge downgrade, but the YouTube experience is great, and it can easily watch videos on other Web sites too.
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 :)
I’ve been using vacuumtube and I quite like it
Been a while since I did this. But isn’t there a YouTube plugin for Kodi anymore? Back then I would send videos from my phone to Kodi using Yatse.
Yes, there is a YouTube addon for Kodi. I came here to recommend.
It’s not perfect for sure. There are some things that are annoying or difficult. I get the feeling that the developer is constantly playing cat and mouse with YouTube. But overall it blocks ads and plays my videos so I use it every day. I’m watching right now…
on my side, videos are crashing after around 90 seconds since a week or so…
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 grayjay on my phone, and casts the videos via fcast.
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
2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.
[Thread #82 for this comm, first seen 19th Aug 2026, 23:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
If you want to watch specific channels you follow, Pinchflat
Also smart tube
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
deleted by creator
Supertube on a fire stick works ok.
I use the Kodi Invidious Plugin and my own Invidious instance.
I ended up with the same solution, but it is a bit lacking and seems to be abandoned. Did you manage to import playlists from other devices?
What about not using Youtube at all? Or just the bare minimum, without account, without interactions to stop to feed the system at a user level?
How do I do thing
Have you considered not doing thing
Thought I was on Reddit for a second. Guess some things transferred over.
