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Comment by webwanderings | Hacker News Reader

Have you investigated their rabbit hole for children? YT for Kids simply needs to die. They are evil.

Tangent: I'm expecting a kid, and time will come in couple years, when I'll want to show them kid videos. I fully intend to set this up as streaming from a library curated by my wife & me, populated with youtube-dl and through other means.

I know some people on HN have such setups; could you share recommendations for hardware and software stack? I suspect a Raspberry Pi may not be enough (having network and USB sharing capacity), especially if we want to simultaneously stream movies for ourselves. But I also don't want to turn it into some $1k+ server build, the way they do on /r/plex and elsewhere. Could anyone recommend a "compromise" setup, that would allow to comfortably stream HD videos to 2-3 devices simultaneously?

If you're in the United States, 90% of the population can receive the 24/7 PBS Kids channel over the air for free.

If you're worried about the quality of content from YouTube, or the chances that someone gaming the system dumps questionable content into your stream, it's worth spending ten bucks on an antenna. It's also good for supplementing your child's YouTube viewing when YT starts showing the same stuff over and over.

The PBS kids website has a lot on it as well, all ad-free.

Also PBS kids apps, ad-free as well.

Not in the US; unfortunately, I don't think Poland has a dedicated government channel for kids.

Still, I want to make it video-on-demand, but with content fully curated by us - to avoid age-inappropriate content, ads and recommendations. There's no way I'm going to let my kid touch raw YouTube in the next decade.

We do, tv-trwam.pl

Hahaha, no.

It may not be much help, but I've found minidlna to be a reliable, simple, lightweight media server on my LAN. I expect it could run well on a low-power device. Any DLNA/UPNP device can stream from it.

Thanks, I noted it down and will check it out.

I don't have much to add, other than I have had some good results with using the application "4k video downloader" to grab playlists on youtube. I'm not a fan of the generic name, but it does what it sets out to do and is fairly cheap. I'm sure everything can be done with youtube-dl, but I don't have a ton of experience with that.

I am able to get most of the videos downloaded and converted using that application. Sometimes I have to go and manually get a couple of videos that failed to download, but the app has served me well.

Using ytdl is easy: `youtube-dl $url` grabs the video at the highest quality. Playlists can be downloaded this way too.

Whatever you do, keep the kids off youtube unless you want to deal with nightmares and other unpleasantness.

(I have a seven year old and a three year old)

In the end we just settled on netflix and the national broadcasting company (NRK), but I do have a synology nas with some stuff that I can stream to mobiles/ps4 via dnla or apps which would do most of what you want.

Agreed! What I have found is that most legitimate popular YT kids content (Blippi, Pinkfong, etc.) is also available repackaged and included in Amazon Prime. I've been using that for most kids content instead, as it's not just sponsored toy unboxing crap and I don't need to worry about weird auto-playing recommendations or commercials.

Elsagate videos would be a good next step; I suppose they wouldn't be covered by YT's announcement.

Have you used YouTube Kids in the last ~6 months? They made a lot of changes and enabled a mode where only human-vetted videos from topics/creators you select can play. I don't have kids but had assumed that problem was largely addressed.

No it has not. An average person wouldn’t have time to tweak the unknown changes thrown by unknown developers at them for their kids viewing experience. Nobody should trust the YT for kids because their primary motivation is not kids safety or education. When my daughter uses PBS Kids or Khan Academy Kids, I don’t have to worry about what they are throwing at her (relatively). YT on the other hand is a pure disaster waiting to happen to parents, if they don’t know (I was in that boat for some time).

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