Hei
As you may have noticed, Youtube is kinda shitty in 2026. There are various solutions to that (pay, use one of a zillion apps, use invidious etc). All of those have their pros and cons…but for me, SmartTube was always the GOAT.
As the big-screen Youtube replacement, you can’t get much better.
Recently though, Google have been right pains in the ass here. For example, I am not able to view my own saved playlists without logging in…and to log in, I need to provide photoID. Haha, no.
So, I got a stick up my ass and decided to cook up a solution. One thing led to another and well…here we are.
Cool story bro. WTF is this?
The inventively named SmartTube LOCAL came about because Google got on my tits…and unlike a sane person, I decided to code around it. For 6 months. Because that seemed like a sane solution.
So, here’s SmartTube LOCAL, with the following cool feats.
- Offline playback from your SMB share, via MeTube or yt-dlp. Finally, you can watch Youtube without needing JF or Plex.
- AUTO / LOCAL ONLY modes. Mix YouTube with your archive, or tell Google to fuck off entirely.
- OFFLINE PROFILES. Give everyone their own subscriptions, playlists and settings, without Google accounts. Keep the kids on approved local content while the adults get the whole shebang.
- Parental controls. Restrict what the kids can watch without maintaining separate archives. No more brainrot.
- Local search, recommendations and SponsorBlock, even offline.
- Playlist and subscription imports from Google Takeout and NewPipe.
You’ll need an SMB share and the included Python catalogue publisher. A little elbow grease required for now. Sorry - I would have baked that in, but I have some old ass TVs in the extended fam I need to support and they might shit themselves polling 20,000 videos.
I just cleaned repo kruft and re-pushed 32.71 (pegged to 32.53 upstream).
https://github.com/bsgcl/SmartTubeLocal
It’s a personal project - which means I get to maintain it forever, yay. I’m just sharing this for fun because it tickles me some to think people are enjoying Youtube “wrong” (according to Big Evil).
PS: Clankers helped with the implementation and testing. Design and review was good old fashioned caffeine and swearing. The questionable life choices are my parents’ fault for raising me wrong / day drinking.
PPS: If you like it, star it, share it, I don’t fucking know. I’m not trying to win a prize pig. Honestly, I stuck it on GitHub so I wouldn’t have to punch a hole in my firewall. Plus this way, the app can auto-magically update on extended fam’s TVs without me having to schlep it all over town.
PPPS: If Google decides to enshittify SABR even further and breaks online playback, at least you’ll still be able to watch your ill-gotten downloads on the big screen. Then Google can fuck off twice.
Pretty pictures because reading it hard
Oh - there one other impetus for this. My eldest keeps nagging me about wanting to be a YouTuber. Well, now she can film her skits, songs, rants etc and we can share them locally on our LAN via syncthing.
Later, if I hate myself enough, I’ll figure out how to use TailScale to share her masterpieces privately with the extended family. YouTube career, minus YouTube.
Also, she got this stuck in my head 3 days ago and I hate how catchy it is. It’s the one piece of brainrot we agreed she could add to the share.
Soooo, it’s kind of a mix of Freetube / Invideous and Pinchflat with Jellyfin for Android? Intersting!
Better :)
The issue with stuff like TubeArchivist, pinchflat etc is that they have great curation and downloading (spoilers: its mostly ytdlp under the hood) but really bad at getting the content onto your TV.
Plex, Jellyfin etc can be press ganged into it, but it’s clunky.
Smarttube was designed for big screen, remote control navigation etc.
What I did was make SmartTube play YouTube videos you download (I like MeTube because I’m not a sadist) alongside live sources.
Use MeTube, Pinchflat or whatever to download your videos. Use SmartTube LOCAL to then play them offline thereafter. It’s android native, so it should work on Chromecast, android TVs, AOSP, Firesticks (maybe?) etc.
Crunching the numbers, using a mix of 720 and 480p, I can store somewhere around 5000, 20-25 minute videos in 500gb. Stick that on a hard drive, plug it into your travel router and you have offline YouTube on a boat, in an offgrid cabin, camping etc. You don’t need a server per se.
Right now it’s configured for TVs but I’m sure I can figure out a way to have it display on android tablets or phones. That’s probably the final buy in step for the kids.
