If you have an Android TV device, SmartTube is fantastic. It’s highly configurable and blocks ads out of the box

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

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 :)

I've been using vacuumtube and I quite like it

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.

I use grayjay on my phone, and casts the videos via fcast.

Also smart tube

If you want to watch specific channels you follow, Pinchflat

I'm assuming you have a CEC dongle or use second remote?

A bit ridiculous, but maybe the SmartTube app via Waydroid?

Not sure if that would operate well on a 4GB Pi.
I suspect you'll either need to keep the Android System always running in the background and sacrifice some of your RAM or go through a slow cold-boot every time you want to watch YouTube.

That being said, privacy friendly? Eh? I guess more than the official App but I don't think they're explicitly doing anything for Privacy since their focus is making sure the app keeps working amidst YouTube's constant changes.

There's some browser extensions that let you run the YouTube Smart TV UI on your browser but not really private. You get uBlock at best.

The most private option would be a front-end like Invidious, but it currently doesn't have Keyboard Navigation, so possibly hard to navigate with a Remote Control, you'd need a mouse or similar device.
There's a feature request for it but devs haven't gotten around it yet.

Maybe you could try to bodge it with a userscript? Idk.

I use the Kodi Invidious Plugin and my own Invidious instance.

You could try this setup. Create a seperate network for TV with no internet (you might need a seperate rj45 connector on PI), then run microsocks proxy on pi (microsocks is super lightweight, and this will be using your other rj45 or wifi with internet), next install smarttube on TV and add your local proxy. You will need to create an exception in your firewall to allow connections to microsocks and block everything.

This way, nothing on your TV should have internet access other than any app you add that can accept a proxy.

If you don't care about your TV spying on you, skip all this and just install smarttube on TV and use it.

Note: I just realized pi already has a wifi and an ethernet connection so you won't need to buy another usb-to-rj45, so use one interface for no-internet-except-microsocks network, and use the other for normal one.

If you have a RPi, install Mozillla Firefox, and Ublock. The only way to watch YT without going nuts.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #82 for this comm, first seen 19th Aug 2026, 23:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Supertube on a fire stick works ok.

The Piped kodi addon sometimes works, but it's been so rare I found myself downloading videos and streaming them to Kodi over DLNA most of the time... Not perfect but it works