I’m not sure it’s the “best” way, but it’s a solid alternative, and receives rapid updates when YouTube moves to break things.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/15571129
I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
And the best part is no ads whatsoever.
SmartTube is pretty great for android TV.
Yaaa.
And I use Enhancer for YouTube™ on desktop Firefox on my Bazzite PC.
And Tubular on my Android phone.
Switched to PipePipe because Tubular is not updated as quickly as Tubular, the dev said it’s not on the top of their list. Also PipePipe has some more features such as playing the video faster while you leaveea finger on the screen.
I prefer PipePipe as well, it’s great It gets frequently updated.
For people who are okay with using YT’s official frontend, I couldn’t recommend Enhancer for Youtube™ more.
It’s annoying though that you can’t save videos to lists or subscribe to channels without logging in to youtube account.
Just make a dummy account for only that if you don’t want to mix yours into YT
It’s using the YouTube API, so that makes sense. The developer likely wants to keep the app focused and reduce the amount of feature creep, hence reusing YouTube’s standard subscription and list systems rather than building their own. That’s also what the majority of users expect - if someone subscribes to a YouTube channel on one device, they’d expect to be subscribed to it on all devices.
Newpipe or Clipious also work on AndroidTV
I use NewPipe on regular Android but read somewhere it wasn’t recommended to be used on Android TV because it wasn’t designed for it. If you vouch for it working fine then maybe I’ll try it.