I’m a very avid YouTube user, I’ve payed for Premium for the last couple of years but am becoming less and less comfortable with it.
YouTube is actually the last Google-service (besides Android, but there are plans to ditch Google there using something like /e/OS) I’m left using after switching to Proton Mail (instead of GMail), Here WeGo (instead Maps), TransIP Stack (instead of Drive) and a self-hosted Memos (instead of Keep).
I tend to watch YouTube on my TV by setting up a queue of videos on my phone and then casting them to my TV. This is all ad-free because of my Premium subscription, but of course everything is tracked.
Is there a way for me to watch YouTube, preferrable on my TV with my phone as remote control, without having a Google-account? I found NewPipe on FDroid, but that sadly does not provide casting (I managed to get it partially working by using VLC, but no queue and no sound whatever I tried)
There are also things like Inoreader that people use, but I believe that does not have queueing and casting as well, so it would not really work in my situation.
Sidenote: I like the idea of creators receiving at least a bit of the payments I make as a reward for the content they post, but I reckon that with something like NewPipe/Piped an ad-blocker in place those would be lost.
Anyone got some ingenious solutions working?
Edit: my TV currently is an Android TV, but that may be up for change sometime later this year, so any external solution like a stick or RPi or something would also be up for consideration.
If you are up for self hosting some cool open source software…
I use tubearchivist to automatically download new videos from my subscriptions and then use Jellyfin + the tubearchivist plugin to organize them.
Now all my you tube videos show up as organized, ad free shows on my personal streaming service!
This sounds like something I’d consider for my homelab. Do you mind elaborating more on the pipeline? How does it look like to prune watched content? Or you keep it forever?
I don’t prune my YouTube content, so I don’t have first hand experience, but tubearchivist supports auto deleting content after X time period after it has been watched.
I think if you are watching through Jellyfin rather than tubearchivist, you’ll need to enable synchronization so Jellyfin can synchronize watched status back to Jellyfin.
Thanks for your inputs! Definitely will check it out, I’m tired of Youtube client ads and recommendations :’)