Have you tried YouTube Kids? I allow my daughter using only YouTube Kids (in kid mode) on my Android phone. The suggested content was good enough. Google also allowed you to supervise the content [1].

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/7178746#block_...

I tried YouTube Kids, but found it was suggesting a lot of surprise egg and colorful slime videos. I blocked those channels, but more showed up, so I deleted the app.

Its only usable (in my opinion) in the allow list channel mode. Otherwise its never ending reaction blocking.

I have a 5 month old daughter, so I obviously haven't tried it yet, but I'm pretty keen on and have been setting up a Jellyfin on a Raspberry Pi, so that when it's time for her to watch some videos, I want it to be a closed environment. No ads, no pushing of shit but specially, no endless stream of videos. I think what makes it worse is having the world in their hands and just be able to watch 2 minutes and skip. I see kids doing that all the time and it makes me feel uneasy. If it completely changed my ability to concentrate as am adult I can't fathom how that "power" affects the mind of a child.

Have you considered to not let the baby see any videos at all? Apparently there is some research that claims that upbringing like that might still create a bad video addiction. The baby should be focussing on you or other people that are around for socialization, not a screen. I understand if there is no time. Hell, I don't have time. But apparently that's what some psychologists are saying.

I'm not going to give her any video before she's 2 years old. And after that we'll try to not do it for as long as we can and it makes sense. Because in the end, I watch movies and series and whatever. But she'll want to watch stuff as we're part of the society. And when that time comes, I'll be prepared with a Jellyfin instance to at least curb some of the attention grabbing feed and ads of current systems :)

you seem to have misread the parent commment in regards to his childs media consumption.

that said, we found that putting up a short video to capture the attention of small children is very effective at calming them down while changing diapers for example.

You seem to have misread my comment. There is research claiming that videos are bad for babies. (!) Then it makes no difference if they're calmed down during diaper change. Valium is also calming, but most people are recommended to stay off it.

my apologies then.

i'm sure there is such research, haven't read into it thou. ime no problem if you limit the exposure to video to a few minutes a day. it's basically the modern version of a sockpuppet.

That is precisely the same idea I ended up on, that feels like the best option. Basically, as a caretaker, nowadays it is most important to curate 100% the kind of media your kids have access to, as otherwise it is impossible for them not to be consumed by the algorithm and end up with a lot of psichological damage. Kudos for taking on such a hard job, hope you find a way to share your projects and results in the end, hope they work out well.

I have a Raspberry pi 4, with Kodi, Sonarr, Radarr, Transmission and nzbget for that. I recently added heimdall as a panel to have all links in one place.

I have all of that, except instead of Kodi, Jellyfin. Also no nzbget because I just found out about that and AFAIK you need some kind of invite to enter a Usenet? I dunno! I get by with torrents :)

The good thing of Usenet, apart from the speed, is that you are downloading only, not sharing, and in some jurisdictions that matters.

Anyway, most free Usenet providers place limits on how much and what you can download. I use Eweka, which is a paid provider. But there are a lot more. Eweka is a normal Usenet provider (I use it to access normal Usenet too) but it gives access to the entire Usenet, and it's fast.

Then nowadays all the pirated content in Usenet is scrambled, so you'll need an indexer, which is a search engine for content on Usenet. I'm not sure if I can share which one I use here, but you can check the Usenet subreddit, if you want to use one.

All in all, the setup works well. I give preference to Usenet content, because it's fast. If the *arr apps can't find the content in Usenet (because it's too old, for example), they switch to torrent.

I believe you're a good father since you're concerned. As time goes you'll teach them focus and they'll teach themselves. Focus is a general problem and it has to be solved as such. More and more distractions will be born as years go by so you need a general solution. That's my suggestion.

~I have all of that, except instead of Kodi, Jellyfin. Also no nzbget because I just found out about that and AFAIK you need some kind of invite to enter a Usenet? I dunno! I get by with torrents :)~

Sorry, wrong thread!

This is a good solution and pretty much what I've done. When you need screen time on the go, putting those videos on an SD card and sticking it in a cheap Kindle Fire with VLC installed also works well.

This would be my approach. My Plex only shows content that I myself hand picked to be on there.

On newpipe you can disable a lot of YouTube features, it might get you part of the way. For example you can disable related/suggested videos and the 'popular' tab, then you can only see things through search or links.

Proactively this is the only thing that worked: get yt premium, download YouTube videos you preselected, and disconnect the child's device.

What does getting YouTube Premium add to that plan? Wouldn't it work just as well without that step?

You need YouTube Premium to be able to download videos to watch offline (plus see no ads)

Newpipe can also download. No need for bloated YouTube-App, Premium subscription or ti hassle with a command line tool (in case CLI's are not your thing).

As also mentioned by others, youtube-dl seems kinda dead. However there is a good fork/successor called "yt-dlp" which, in addition to other nice improvements, also somehow manages to work around the enforced heavy bandwidth limit by YT.

WTH, you don't, just use youtube-dl

I strongly recommend checking out yt-dlp. Forked from youtube-dl but has much quicker downloads.

Never heard of it. Does that work on a child’s iPad and expose videos via an interface that they can navigate?

It's just a command-line tool to download audio/video from youtube (and many other sites). You'd need to setup the iPad thing yourself, maybe using something like Plex?

Consider Jellyfin instead of Plex (doesn't Plex try to push "free" content in addition to what you add to the server?)

Plex has shifted over time to present their content more prominently. It got to the point that your own media isn't even displayed on the default landing screen. Had to re-teach the kids how to find their movies and whatnot.

I haven't had it running in about a year though, couldn't be bothered after a move.

Jellyfin looks nice. I'll have to give it a go. I am dreading having to set everything up again if I move off of plex, rather than just grab my docker-compose file and get going.

All you need is Vanced or NewPipe.

Or youtube-dl. Though I've been getting bandwidth-limited lately...

There is a fork, yt-dlp[0], that I've enjoyed using recently that has some mitigations for this issue[1] (see --throttling-rate)t

[0]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

[1]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/985

…or you can just use NewPipe.

No part of what you just said is true.

* YouTube Kids with allowlist.

* App Timer of zero minutes on YouTube app.

In your comment, is allowlist a list of videos only they can watch? (not a list of 'age ranges' or 'channels', but actually being able to select individual videos). I was never able to get something like this out of youtube kids when I've tried it in the past.

All these services curate for kids and I want to choose what my kids watch, so they are all failing me. (I'm with the others who go with YT premium, youtube-dl, kids watch with vlc or something on a tablet).

Here's an idea: don't let your underage kids on the Internet without supervision.

When my kids want to watch something on a topic, I use yt-dlp to download a bunch of videos.

I have that older synced with my Synology, and my kids have that folder syncing with Synology on their iPad.

I've found this to be a good balance for managing it easily for me, giving them what they want to see without giving youtube access.

My kids have done quite well without watching any YouTube.

What about just removing the youtube app from the tablet you give your child?

Even more "radical" would be not giving the child a tablet at all.

There are good things on YouTube. And, their friends watch YouTube.

I do agree there are good things on YouTube, but there are also horrific, definitely not age appropriate things, and there is not enough control to keep one flowing into the other. We watch YouTube as a family, but we're fortunate in that we all like the same content. But in my opinion, supervision is the only true way to make sure they're only seeing appropriate things.

Also, "their friends are doing it" is a terrible reason to let them do it, IMHO.

If they're so young they get sucked into those weird meme videos they're probably too young for the device, if they're older than that try impressing upon the importance of viewing useful content.

And take it away if you catch them watching pointless stuff.

You can just download those and show them instead of having them browse around Youtube.

But I guess it takes time and effort to do that

I wish my parents had let the "my friends are doing it" excuse work. You're easy.

Depends how old your kids are, but that's what I use it for. You can set the home screen to your subscription list, and it doesn't show related videos unless you go to a separate tab. Those two things have saved me from much screaming about not getting to watch the colorful slime videos that regular YouTube always suggests.

Brave browser let’s you make a playlist of YouTube videos which are downloaded to the device. Curate a playlist and then disconnect wifi and voila? Hope that helps

Short answer: no.

Long answer: I use NewPipe exclusively to watch development videos and it keeps recommending antivaax & alt-right propaganda as related videos.

> Does this or Vanced help with the problem I have: my kids are being brainwashed via Google's algorithms?

Actually yes, kind of? At least a little bit.

NewPipe doesn't have parental controls, so if you don't trust your kids to keep these things on, NewPipe can't help you. However, if you do trust kids and you just want a way to remove some of the influences, NewPipe (and NewPipexSponsorblock[0], if you're comfortable using a fork) have some really compelling features:

- You can turn off comments

- You can turn off recommended videos (including "next/similar" sections alongside videos you're watching)

- NewPipexSponsorblock will skip (many) advertisements within videos

- You can turn off search suggestions as you're searching for new videos

- There are some nice feed options that allow you to have much more curated update feeds, so you spend less time searching for videos in the first place.

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However:

- Again, no parental controls. You either trust your kids to use it or you don't, because your kids can go into the settings and just flip all this stuff back on.

- No way to block videos/channels from appearing in search results, which is something I would love.

- No way to do things like get rid of search and only use a feed.

There is talk on the NewPipe issue tracker about adding a blocklist feature, which I think would be a great improvement, but I have no idea what the priority is[1] or when it would happen.

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I'll speak anecdotally here, but I think that even just Sponsorblock makes a huge difference in the Youtube experience, and I advise any parent with kids to use either NewPipe or the NewPipexSponsorblock fork, and I advise them to install Sponsorblock on their desktop browser. I think that getting rid of recommended videos improved my experience dramatically, I think that having better feeds means I spend less time on Youtube in the first place. I have ADD, these are some of the ways I improve my focus and eliminate distractions.

In regards to Sponsorblock, we can get into debates about whether blocking embedded ads inside of videos is moral; I have my own opinions about that but I understand that it can make people uncomfortable. However, I think the gloves come off when we're talking about kids. I don't think there's a moral argument to be made that kids need to sit through sponsored segments and over-long intros and get crud shoveled at them against their will to support Google.

But basically, even though blocking isn't in yet you can still get rid of a lot of Google recommendations and you can get rid of really cruddy surrounding parts to videos like comments/watch-next/etc, and I think that's really helpful for kids.

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[0]: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe

[1]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/projects/13#card-3163...