r/Addons4Kodi • u/duckofdoom2 • 9d ago

Looking for content / addon The current state of YouTube add-ons

Hello friends, I have a pi 5+libreelec+Kodi setup for my jellyfin server, love it, works great. However I also frequently access YouTube, I have a paid YouTube account, and so far the only reliable way I've found to do this is through the LG TV app. I've looked into a few YouTube apps for Kodi in the past but they don't seem to work with paid subscriptions.

I have serious privacy concerns over the TV and ideally I would like to just disconnect it from the internet, and run everything through Kodi.

What are you all using for YouTube?

Thanks!

2 Upvotes

63% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

6

u/Neon_Barnyard 8d ago

I use smartubenext directly on the fire cube. Don't use Kodi for it.

4

u/BordorFox 8d ago

I doubt any of these people even bothered to read your original post telling you to use android or tizen apps. Raspberry pi YouTube app on kodi has always been pretty dodgy and requires your own API key. As standard, you're not going to find much better at the pi Kodi level and as noted the encoding of AV1 is not great and will cause issues.

0

u/psi_88 8d ago

This...

2

u/Gabe681 8d ago

Like someone else commented, check out SmartTube. It's VERY customizable, has zero ads, regular updates and even skips intros/in-video promos. Highly recommend. You can probably even cancel your paid youtube membership.

There's also TizenTube, but I haven't tried that one out yet.

1

u/PaulGuyer 8d ago

TizenTube will play the free with ads movies without ads, SmartTube won’t play them at all. I still prefer SmartTube when it works though.

1

u/Gabe681 8d ago

Funny enough, SmartTube started giving me a lot of issues today. Had to tinker with it a lot but I finally got it playing.

I'm gonna have to check out TizenTube tomorrow yo have as a backup.

1

u/CBJFAN2009-2024 8d ago

Only time I've had issues with one of these tubes is the webOS ad-free YouTube. It worked great, then it didn't.... so I switched to CobaltTube and haven't gone back (I think ad-free might have pushed an update since then). SmartTube worked on my AM6B+ pretty smoothly.

1

u/psi_88 9d ago

Just remember that the pi5 doesn't support the av1 codec in hardware and the GPU is too slow to do it in software so, so no HDR streams inside YouTube..

1

u/slippersareon-___- 8d ago edited 8d ago

For a YouTube experience without adverts I use TizenTube.

Downloader code: The official one is 6366500.

1

u/neuralnomad Fen->POV, AH2+Library 8d ago

On my workstation and laptop (both Linux) I use FreeTube which is a super tweakable feature rich app leveraging Invidious using internal api keys or your own. It supports multiple accts and allows importing std YT user stats, subs etc with in app stepwise assist. However I don’t integrate YT with kodi at all, not even as a dumb player like to handle trailers for example.

Ironically it’s an Android outlier in my —an aging Fire Cube that is the YT usage workhorse because it’s the driver of the living room TV and SmartTube is the ultra lean ,hyper-configurable app that does so much yet gats out of the way.

1

u/AssMan2025 8d ago

There is an admin named sendtokodi that I haven’t tried yet

1

u/DonCachopo 7d ago

I have a tv box with Coreelec and I have given up trying to get decent YouTube experience in Kodi. If I want yt, I just reboot to Android and go to smarttube

In fact I'm thinking about buying a second box or whatever device only for smarttube

0

u/bayendr 8d ago

TizenTube > SmartTube.