OldTube TV

YouTube frontend for Leanback, TV and XL.

setup

make sure you have imagemagick and ffmpeg in your PATH.
Flash is needed for certain things: https://archive.org/details/flashplayer_old (Flash 32) or https://gitlab.com/cleanflash/installer/-/releases (Clean Flash 34)

install node.js
open a terminal (windows powershell/cmd) in the directory you cloned the instance to, then:
install required dependencies with: npm install
create a config file by launching and following: node yt2009setup.js
run to set and download remaining assets node post_config_setup.js
run instance by changing directory to back (cd back) and starting with node backend.js
navigate to your IP:port you have set while configuring to see a 2009 homepage.

afterwards, you can just cd back and node backend.js to start. no need to re-set it up each time.

Done!

if you want to update your frontend instance, use

git pull --no-commit

to get you up with updates you may have missed.

if you modified the code yourself and you're getting a merge conflict, use

git checkout -- <file>

to restore the original file. you can make a copy of your modified file and reapply the mod after the pull is done.

now that you're in, you can just use it as it is, but there is a bit more you can do.

Type your instance and then any kind of TV, Leanback or XL by /xl, /tv, /leanback etc. Some of them (like Leanback Lite V3 or Google TV) needs Flash.

and just click around! you might find some useful features you didn't expect to work.

over time, depending on your usage, yt2009 may take up a lot of space (counted in tens of gigabytes!)

if you need to reclaim space, look through the assets folder where downloaded files (such as images, videos) are saved and delete ones you need.

they will be redownloaded when necessary.