SmartTube 32.52 LOCAL (no youtube sign in needed)

[BobbyLLM]

Good morning all.

Firstly, please let me thank the entire SmartTube crew for all the work you've done over the years. Even after donating a few $$$ your way, I still feel guilty getting so much out of your work. With that in mind, I wanted to give something back.

As you may (or may not) know, YouTube in Australia is now requiring ID (real-time video, government-issued ID) as a means of age verification. Without it, I am sadly unable to use SmartTube as previously - saved playlists, search, etc. Yes, I can do all that signed out...but not signed in. Bizarre.

I am not comfortable with Google getting my ID, so I wanted to create a workaround. I also didn't want to bother the team with begging...so I did the work myself and extended 32.53 slightly.

I've made a small, unofficial fork of SmartTube aimed at anonymous/local-only use:

https://github.com/BobbyLLM/SmartTube

The basic gist: removed Google account/authentication, made local playlists first order and tied in PINs to that (so you can still isolate "kids" from parents accounts etc)

At present it has:

• local profiles
• per-profile subscriptions and playlists
• per-profile password/PIN protection
• anonymous search and playback
• profile isolation
• No fucking youtube log in or auth needed!

I left the rest of SmartTube deliberately alone (other than making the icon blue, so that no one would get confused with mainline). I'm not trying to rewrite it or start a competing project; this is basically SmartTube with a tweak (local accounts and playlists as first class citizens).

Sadly of course that means you cannot sync between devices (...yet) but it beats the alternative.

PS: I'm also working on a way of importing Google Takeout playlists directly into the local playlist system, because manually recreating 290 playlists containing ~1,900 videos sounded like an unexcellent way to spend the rest of my natural life.

PPS: This is entirely unofficial, so please don't bother the SmartTube maintainers with bugs in my fork. Actually, don't bother me with em either :) If I've broken something, that's my problem. I'm also maintaining it primarily for my own use, so while anyone is welcome to use or fork it, I can't promise support (though naturally I will patch it and resync to main-line if and when youtube break things again).

I hope this fork is of help to someone and thank you again to all the good people that have worked on SmartTube.

[BobbyLLM]

I updated the fork overnight, so now you can download your Google Takeout data as a ZIP, import it, wait about 5 minutes, and voila - all your playlists are available locally. You can add to them locally, obviously, but those changes won’t sync back to YouTube. "Likes" and "Comments" obviously don't work either.

Sorry, I couldn't figure out how to do local avatars or progress indicator bar for the import (well, I mean, I could...I just couldn't be arsed to spend another 4-5hrs doing it, then testing it etc etc).

Give me 10 mins to sync it, the enjoy your pirate youtubez, yarr!