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TV-friendly YouTube frontend

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.

drwankingstein , (edited )

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.

Moonrise2473 , (edited )

What about freetube? Newer desktop update has giant smartphone-like buttons that are perfect for TV usage

For example, now the play button on my 27" is a circle with diameter 25 cm

pfaca ,

I’m running a RPI4 with LibreELEC + Kodi.

YouTube runs better than the official app, at least for my needs.

LibreELEC + Kodi works out of the box with the TV Remote. And you can use Kore (android app) to get a full keyboard.

tkw8 ,

Do you use a remote control or a wireless keyboard & mouse. I’m looking into this setup and am curious how others drive their home theater machine.

pfaca ,

I use the TV remote control for the basic stuff. If I need to type something longer or more options, than I switch to Kore (official Kodi remote by the same developers). You just need the phone to be in the same network.

Never felt the need to connect keyboard+mouse.

somerandomname ,

YT plugin for Kodi is quite decent. Have it daily in use, no issues so far.

jared ,
@jared@mander.xyz avatar

Smarttube really does work well, if your good with messing around a bit I’ve spun up android vm’s and the other android tools on Linux to watch smarttube with a bluetooth remote.

wildbus8979 ,

I’d prefer that it function well with Kodi. Is the Kodi YouTube plugin any good

I think you have your answer right there, why not try it out and see how you like it?

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