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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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.
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.
I would really like to know as well. NewPipe is a pain to navigate on TV.
Since you said you use NewPipe on a TV, I assume it’s some sort of Android TV? Why don’t you just use SmartTube?
Mostly because it’s not available in F-Droid.
Does F-Droid even have an Android TV client?
The regular F-Droid client works (but it’s even harder to navigate than NewPipe). I should probably just try SmartTube, since it has auto-update capability anyway.
I just adb installed the SmartTube APK from my laptop over the network
SmartTube self updates BTW. So once its loaded you dont need to do it again. Same with S0und for Twitch.
