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