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.
Comment on Recommendations to watch Youtube on TV
PlasticQuality7519@reddthat.com 2 days ago
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
nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 2 days ago
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 15 hours ago
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.