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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22977 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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There's a tool called yt-dlp which allows you to easily download youtube videos (including entire playlists).

You could download the "whitelist" videos to your computer, transfer them to the tablet via USB thumbdrive or somesuch, and just cut youtube out completely.

If you really wanted to be crafty, you could install jellyfin on a computer somewhere on your network, download the videos to that (as well as any other videos you want to whitelist), and then put the jellyfin client on the tablet and give him a youtube-like experience.

Yes I could do a lot of things. The videos are integrated into the web site so there's written parts and video parts that need to be next to each other to not be frustrating with, say, scripting yt-dlp to download all of the allowed videos to a folder that he has to switch to and find and run.

Anyway, I'm an ex Google engineer and I'm just saying it's not trivial to work around the viral and distracting content being jammed at him from every direction. It's a lot worse than me being on the internet unsupervised when I was a kid.

You could also script the download to run every day for a set of approved channels. And you could also, if you are so inclined, set up something like ErsatzTV and create your own TV channel (complete with EPG) with youtube videos, music videos downloaded with yt-dlp as well from playlists of best 80s, 90s and 00s music videos, ripped TV shows from DVDs (and not torrents, that would be piracy!), movies and even 80s and 90s ads as padding between "shows" (there's channels with lots of ads on youtube). And then serve that through Jellyfin.

*EDIT: The perils of new comments browsing! I missed the part in the OP where he wanted a specific channel and nothing else! Still, he could make a curated channel with a specific schedule for his kid; piano lessons run from this time to that time. Having to follow a hard schedule probably teaches kids a valuable lesson about punctuality and understanding that the world doesn't revolve around them.

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