Been a while since I did this. But isn't there a YouTube plugin for Kodi anymore? Back then I would send videos from my phone to Kodi using Yatse.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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I use grayjay on my phone, and casts the videos via fcast.
I run ytdl-sub in my jellyfin. Totally does not fit your bill, but its awesome if you just want to follow a few channels :)
If you have an Android TV device, SmartTube is fantastic. It’s highly configurable and blocks ads out of the box
I'm terrified some day it'll stop working and I'll have to go back to regular YouTube!
I have an LG with WebOS which is also not connected to the internet. So that's unfortunately not an option.
I’ll tell you what I use, appreciate that it doesn’t cover your needs (I was more focused on avoiding unskippable ads) and it’s a bit fiddly but it might provide a good starting point.
I also have a RPi 4 8Gb that runs a self-hosted Plex (Jellyfin would work even better arguably). “Playlists” are different Plex libraries.
For subscriptions, or channels where I want every vid, I have a crontab that wakes up once a week, downloads latest vids via yt-dlp, and puts them in the relevant Plex library.
For Discovery or ad-hoc vids, I rely on “real” youtube in my PC, and when I find something I want to watch I just manually share the link with a script in the Pi that will pull it via yt-dlp and put it in yet another “adhoc videos” Plex Library.
It works great for my purposes. A few caveats: There is the usual arms race between yt-dlp and The Formerly Not-Evil Company, so you need to keep updating yt-dlp every week or so. Also, the vids I like are transient, so I delete them after a month or so, but you can choose to archive them differently.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you want more details, I can happily yap about it for hours :D
Well, the clear answer is Smart tube...but I think you might be talking about downloading and integrating into your media stack?
If so...doesn't Jellyfin have a plugin for TubeArchivist?