Comment by ulzeraj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ulzeraj | Hacker News Reader

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I have a Sharp TV on my living room and the YT app crashes everytime a certain type of ad is played after the video starts. I don't know if its the video codec or if the TV is having a hard time going back to the original video. Out of nowhere a 5 second chocolate or cheese ad plays and the TV OS completely crashes.

Tried attaching an ARM SBC with Librelec but the state of the Youtube apps are extremely broken in a way that you need api keys from a google cloud account and that allows you to only play videos. Your subscriptions and everything are not imported. PS4 runs fine but I don't want to run a 100W console to watch YT videos.

Meanwhile I've found out that most of my favorite channels (mostly tech and retro stuff) are also uploading to Odyssey as a sort of backup strategy. That works very well for me.

Get an Amazon Firestick and install SmartTubeNext on to it. The Firestick plugs into your HDMI so your TV doesn't need to do any extra processing.

Can your SBC run Android (or even better, LineageOS)? If so, you can install Kodi for Android and launch Youtube or Newpipe within Kodi.

It is a RockPro64. The stock image offered by Pine is borderline useless barebones without the store. Some complicated process involving connecting an usb-c cable and running ADB from Android SDK is necessary.

I also tried some Android distribution called Slash TV which seems to be kinda complete but the videos keep defaulting to 480p even after I set my preferences to high quality. It seems Slash TV is a one man's project and it hasn't received an upgrade in a while.

I was surprised how much of a nice product Librelec is but all the YT apps for Kodi (Youtube, Tubed) are in this broken state due to some API changes.

Yeah, I run LibreELEC on an x86 machine, but the connectivity to online providers is just not there. Netflix and Spotify are other two services with mostly broken plugins.

Would a Chromecast cover your use case?

Maybe but if the solution is throwing more money into hardware I'd rather get something like an Apple TV or Nvidia Shield.

Oh, good point; I was thinking from the perspective that a Chromecast is cheap, but it looks like an Apple TV is only $180 which probably is close enough if you use it any decent amount.

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